Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution: 1969–1979 [1 ed.] 9780522877830, 9780522877847

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Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution 1969–1979 Isobelle Barrett Meyering

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au

First published 2022 Text © Isobelle Barrett Meyering, 2022 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Text design by J & M Typesetting Cover design by John Canty Cover image: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation Typeset by J & M Typesetting Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522877830 (paperback) 9780522877847 (ebook)

Contents Introduction: Childhood is Hell Chapter 1: Why Children’s Liberation? Chapter 2: Free Mum, Free Dad, Free Me, Free Child Care Chapter 3: Educate to Liberate Chapter 4: What Every Girl Should Know Chapter 5: Exposing Abuse Afterword: Care for Kids?

Endnotes Bibliography Index

Acknowledgements This book has been many years in the making. It began as my doctoral thesis at UNSW, where I was incredibly fortunate to be supervised by Zora Simic. I could not have asked for a more dedicated supervisor and advocate. Zora’s commitment to this project was unwavering and her intellectual generosity remains a model to me. My thanks also go to Anne O’Brien, my co-supervisor, who provided invaluable advice and encouragement as the project evolved. Macquarie University has proven to be an ideal place to complete this work. Michelle Arrow has been an important and supportive mentor and provided wise counsel and feedback as this book took final shape. The influence of her scholarship on my own thinking is apparent throughout. I also thank all my colleagues in Modern History for the interest they have shown in my research and members of the faculty-wide Children’s Rights, Participation and Perspectives research stream for helping me view this project in a wider context. The Faculty of Arts Research Office has been ready to assist whenever needed and provided a publication subsidy to support essential costs associated with this book. I am also deeply appreciative of the support I have received beyond these institutions. Numerous individuals have played a role in shaping this project, but I especially thank Joy Damousi for backing this work in her capacity as MUP’s History Series editor, Shurlee Swain for her ongoing interest since agreeing to examine my doctoral thesis and Ann Curthoys for her generous endorsement of the final publication. Over the years, the Sydney Feminist History Group has provided a welcoming space to share ideas and connect with other scholars, while fellow members of Oral History NSW and the History Council of NSW have offered refreshing perspectives on bringing history to a wider audience. Camille Nurka was an

enthusiastic reader and careful editor of my work when I was first preparing this manuscript for MUP. I am also grateful to the Australian Academy of the Humanities for awarding funding to this work under its Publication Subsidy Scheme in 2020. The ideas presented in this book have previously been presented in a range of scholarly forums. I first explored the concept of children’s liberation in an article, ‘Liberating Children: The Australian Women’s Liberation Movement and Children’s Rights in the 1970s’, published in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal in 2013. This book is also informed by work I have published separately as articles for Australian Historical Studies and Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, and as book chapters in Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity (2016) and A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity (2018). I thank the editors of these publications for their feedback and guidance, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers for their insights. I also acknowledge those who have assisted with the practical side of this research. The feminist archive is a sprawling one, and undertaking the research for this book involved navigating multiple collections across the country. My thanks go to the staff and volunteers who helped me in this process at the Australian Queer Archives, Fryer Library (University of Queensland), Murdoch University Library, National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Pride History Group and University of Melbourne Archives. This book also draws on a selection of interviews that I undertook in the early stages of my doctoral studies. In addition to the individuals cited in the text, I am grateful to all those who participated in this component of my research; our conversations enriched my understanding of this period in all kinds of ways. It goes without saying that I owe a huge thanks to the team at MUP, especially Nathan Hollier for seeing the value of this project in the first place and Catherine McInnis for guiding me through each stage of the publishing process, with unerring patience and understanding. Caitlin McGregor brought a sharp eye and political nous to the copyediting process. I also thank the two peer reviewers for their encouraging comments and astute suggestions for improvement.

The process of research and writing can at times be all-consuming. My friends have kept me grounded over the years. Special thanks go to those of you who have shared parts of the journey through academia, in particular Chelsea Barnett, Kristie Flannery, Emma Gleadhill, Matthew Haultain-Gall, James Keating, Anna Lebovic, Stephanie Mawson, Briony Neilson, Jess Parr, Keith Rathbone, Sophie Robinson, Francesco Stolfi and Inara Walden. To all my other friends—you know who you are; thanks for providing welcome distraction when needed and tolerating periods of neglect when deadlines loomed. My family have gone above and beyond in supporting this endeavour. Writing a book while adjusting to parenthood, let alone during a pandemic, proved more challenging than I ever expected. Thank you to my parents, Gudrun Meyering and Chris Barrett, and to Alexander Barrett Meyering, Elena Fombertaux and Anne Janda for helping us all get through this time. To Michael Janda: thank you for your confidence in me, for the countless hours you have put in to help see this project to completion and, above all, for reminding me what matters. Josephine Janda-Meyering arrived in this world appropriately on International Women’s Day in 2020. This book is for you, Josie—I look forward to finding out what you make of it.

Introduction Childhood is Hell

‘Childhood is hell’, pronounced North American radical feminist Shulamith Firestone in 1970.1 A ‘cult of childhood’ had taken hold of modern society, concealing the harsh realities of ‘what childhood is really like’, she argued.2 Adults were inclined towards a fantasied view of childhood happiness when, in practice, children were ‘repressed at every waking minute’.3 Firestone was the author of the bestseller The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) and the argument that children represented a uniquely oppressed class was one of its central propositions. In a chapter titled ‘Down with Childhood’, Firestone set out to show that children’s physical dependence on adults had been compounded by a wide range of social practices, from their legal designation as minors to the development of a special industry of child-care experts. The cumulative effect was to disenfranchise children, on the one hand, and reinforce women’s maternal role, on the other. The oppression of women and children was ‘intertwined and mutually reinforcing’. It therefore followed that children’s liberation was a prerequisite of women’s liberation.4 A year after the book’s release, Australian feminist Biff Ward (then Macdougall) reviewed The Dialectic of Sex for the Sydney women’s liberation newspaper Mejane. She proclaimed Firestone ‘the most important Women’s Liberation theorist to date’. Ward was impressed by many aspects

of the book, but reserved her highest praise for Firestone’s ‘attack on the institution of childhood’. She found in Firestone’s work a ‘passionate plea for the abolition of “childhood” and “adolescence,” and for a new awareness of young human beings as people’.5 Others would likewise find themselves captivated by Firestone’s analysis of children’s liberation and were spurred to take on a wide variety of projects in its name. Indeed, at the end of the decade, The Dialectic of Sex was still being appealed to as an authoritative statement on the subject by activists engaged in campaigns around issues ranging from child care to child abuse. Yet, although The Dialectic of Sex has been consistently cited as one of the most influential texts for Australian women’s liberation, Firestone’s vision of feminism as a joint project of women’s liberation and children’s liberation—and the diverse forms of political action it helped to inspire—rarely rates a mention in histories of the movement.6 When I first read The Dialectic of Sex, I was in my mid-twenties and had recently commenced my doctoral research on the history of Australian women’s liberation. Involved in women’s activism since my undergraduate years, I thought I had a relatively good handle on feminist theory. But Firestone’s calls for children’s liberation took me by surprise. The Dialectic of Sex is better known for its forthright critique of maternity as the primary source of female oppression. Firestone famously described pregnancy as ‘barbaric’ and advocated artificial reproduction in its place.7 I did not expect to find such a sympathetic account of childhood oppression in this supposed exemplar of ‘feminist antinatalism’.8 Prompted by the discovery, I sought out references to the concept of children’s liberation in other sources. As I trawled through the collection of archival material I had already started to amass, it quickly became apparent that Firestone’s views were far from exceptional. While The Dialectic of Sex made the case for children’s liberation most explicitly, the concept reverberated through a wide range of other feminist texts of the period and was put into practice in diverse ways. Evidence of the children’s liberation ethos abounded once I started looking: from communal child-care experiments that claimed to free children from the oppression of the nuclear family and non-sexist children’s books that provided models of children rebelling against adult authority, to sex education resources that promoted

more open discussion of sexual pleasure and children’s programs implemented in domestic violence refuges to ensure child residents’ distinctive needs were addressed. Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution: 1969–1979 is the product of these investigations. The book draws on archival research and personal accounts to uncover the radical vision of children’s rights pursued by Australian women’s liberationists during the 1970s. Not satisfied by promises of basic protections, feminists demanded children’s liberation from adult power in all its forms. Their vision was a revolutionary one: to create a new society in which relations between adults and children, as well as women and men, would be fundamentally refigured. The resulting political agenda would prove especially attractive to feminist mothers, but also attracted a diverse range of other women, including teachers, cultural activists and feminist service workers. Together they worked to transform the institutions they most closely associated with the misuse of adult power—the childhood industry, schools, the welfare system and, above all, the nuclear family—and to initiate a broader shift in social attitudes towards children. It was a bold vision, underpinned by a belief that women’s demands for autonomy and self-determination must be extended to children too. These ideas did not emerge in isolation. The feminist agenda of children’s liberation was conceived in the context of a larger global youth rebellion against adult authority. The late 1960s and the 1970s are widely recalled as years of generational conflict, as those born during the affluent post-war years questioned the apparent complacency of their parents. Their disillusionment fuelled not only a vocal student and anti-war movement, including demands for the lowering of the voting age, but a wider cultural rebellion.9 These generational conflicts prompted a wide range of radicals to reassess the rights of children, as reflected in the writings of antipsychiatry theorists, radical educationists, countercultural activists and sexual libertarians. These radicals shared with women’s liberationists a deep antipathy towards established forms of authority and sought to expose the role of childhood socialisation in the maintenance of the status quo. Moreover, they emphasised—and celebrated—the supposedly untapped potential of the child: once liberated from adult power, children would

finally be able to articulate their interests and make their own decisions, they argued.10 In this respect, the concept of children’s liberation differed from previous approaches to children’s rights that assumed that children needed adults to act on their behalf. For women’s liberationists, the concept of children’s liberation also served to distinguish their politics from those of previous generations of feminist and women’s rights activists. Their predecessors had made children’s welfare a major focus, launching campaigns around issues ranging from infant health and child endowment to the age of consent and juvenile offending. However, these campaigns were largely embedded in a maternalist framework, positioning women as playing a key role in the ‘protection’ of children.11 By contrast, women’s liberationists insisted that an emphasis on children’s need for ‘protection’ only contributed further to children’s oppression by reinforcing their dependent status. The demand for children’s liberation reflected the movement’s more confrontational style of sexual politics, which saw them reject middle-class domesticity and the nuclear family in particular as instruments of capitalist oppression.12 Women’s liberationists were not alone in advocating children’s liberation during this period, but they were among its most enthusiastic and vocal proponents, for they saw its potential to transform the lives of both women and children. Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution seeks to highlight the movement’s distinctive contribution to this new mode of children’s rights activism. To do so, it explores a wide variety of feminist initiatives that either expressly articulated the goal of children’s liberation as a central platform or implicitly supported this position by calling attention to the conditions of disempowerment specific to the situation of the child. Brought together here, these initiatives not only help to locate women’s liberation in a wider radical milieu, but also underline the movement’s utopian outlook. If nothing else, women’s liberation activists’ pursuit of children’s liberation—which, for Firestone, was nothing less than the ‘elimination’ of childhood—speaks powerfully to their desire to ‘remake their world’.13 This utopianism was especially evident in activists’ efforts to enact children’s liberation in their own lives. As historian Marilyn Lake and others have noted, a belief that change ‘had to begin with oneself’ was central to the movement’s revolutionary outlook.14 Tracing activists’

manifold attempts to put the philosophy of children’s liberation into practice in turn offers new insights into this crucial dimension of feminist politics and the challenges it presented for activists on the ground. This history also serves as a timely reminder of the politically contested nature of childhood and the need for continued critical engagement with contemporary children’s rights frameworks. Decades after feminists issued their calls for children’s liberation, the debates charted in this book remain pertinent ones, not least of all given our continued investment in notions of childhood innocence, vulnerability and incapacity—ideas that remain pervasive in contemporary discourse, from discussions of children’s mental health to the treatment of asylum seekers and Indigenous children. As Australian philosopher Joanne Faulkner warns, one of the perverse effects of constructing childhood in these terms is to diminish the importance of children in other ways: if ‘children come to be valued only by virtue of their innocence, we risk losing the capacity to value them in other respects’.15 Other recent critical childhood scholarship has similarly highlighted the paradoxical effects of the cultural emphasis on childhood innocence and, in particular, its implications for debates around gender and sexuality. Much of this work focuses on instances of ‘moral panic’ over children’s sexuality and the ways in which discourses of ‘protection’ perform a regulatory function, delimiting the types of sexual knowledge and experience allowed to children—while also making it more difficult to have meaningful discussions about consent and sexual ethics.16 Others note the uneven ways in which the discourse of innocence is applied. The historic Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013– 2017) has, for example, brought welcome public attention to the issue of sexual violence, but also exposed longstanding cultural assumptions about the ‘worthiness’ of different categories of victims. Arguably one unintended effect has been to marginalise stories of other forms of mistreatment.17 The concept of childhood innocence also manifests in contemporary discourse in surprising ways. Recent mobilisations by children and young people around issues ranging from LGBTQIA+ rights to climate change have been widely greeted by progressive activists as evidence of their capacity to contribute productively to national political debate. Yet even the responses of sympathetic adults, reassured by the ‘hopefulness’ and

‘optimism’ of younger generations, are at times revealing of a tendency to patronise and sentimentalise childhood, while backlash from conservative politicians demonstrates a dogged unwillingness to recognise children’s actions as legitimate interventions into the political realm. Children are either deemed to be the victims of adult manipulation or simply told to keep out of politics.18 Against the backdrop of these contemporary contests, this book invites critical consideration of the ways in which we frame discussions of children’s rights and agency. This history warrants particular attention given the ways in which feminism is itself often positioned in debates about childhood and children’s rights. As feminist scholar Barbara Baird notes, ‘the child’ has often been ‘used’ against feminism: feminists are, on the one hand, accused of inciting women to abandon their children as they seek out roles in the public sphere and, on the other, disparaged when they speak about children and related subjects, such as childbirth, child care and child abuse.19 As we will see, the former view—that of the ‘anti-child’ feminist —is one closely bound up with the history of women’s liberation. One of the key contributions of this book is to challenge this caricature and, in doing so, to promote more informed engagement with feminism’s past.

Women’s Liberation in Australia, ‘Feminist Amnesia’ and the ‘Anti-Child’ Feminist Stereotype The late 1960s and the 1970s represent a defining moment in the history of Australian feminism. This period saw the emergence of the ‘new feminism’, or what has since become more widely known as the ‘second wave’—an upsurge in feminist activism that, as historian Michelle Arrow has recently reiterated, ‘destabilised a foundational concept of modern political culture: the notion that there were two separate spheres of life, public and private’.20 Women’s liberation positioned itself as the revolutionary arm of the new feminism. It formed part of the wider eruption of protest movements emerging out of the new left, involving student radicals, anti-war activists, trade unionists, Indigenous rights activists, sexual libertarians and gay liberationists.21 Together, these movements generated an optimistic political climate: for women’s liberationists and other radicals, ‘these were inspired

and searching times when it was possible to rethink old, familiar assumptions’.22 The first women’s liberation groups in Australia formed simultaneously in Sydney and Adelaide during the summer of 1969–1970, inspired in large part by events in the United States and Britain.23 Women’s liberation soon spread to Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Hobart, as well as several regional cities, though it was not until May 1972 that the first public meeting of women’s liberation took place in Perth.24 Over the course of the decade, women’s liberation grew and took a range of forms. Members formed action groups to campaign around issues ranging from reproductive rights to workplace discrimination and set up local consciousness-raising groups in which they reflected on the effects of sexism on their own lives. Within a few years, they had begun creating their own alternative institutions, such as women’s centres, feminist health services, rape crisis centres and women’s refuges, in an effort to provide safe spaces for women in the wider community. Taking advantage of their strong presence on university campuses, some activists initiated women’s studies courses in universities and local colleges. Others became involved in what has since been described as a ‘cultural renaissance’ in women’s art, literature, film, music and theatre.25 Most early members of the women’s liberation movement were drawn from the new left, though the relationship was not a straightforward one. Women’s liberation was formed, in part, as a reaction against ‘male chauvinism’ within the new left and insisted that it was an autonomous movement. At the same time, the early links between the new left and women’s liberation shaped its distinctive style of feminist politics, including its rejection of ‘reformism’, its commitment to collective action and its resistance to formal structures.26 These principles distinguished women’s liberation from other variants of second-wave feminism that emphasised the need to work within existing political structures—most notably, the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), which formed in April 1972 and became a formidable player in the federal election later that year after its survey of candidates, designed to test their views on a wide range of women’s issues, gained widespread media coverage.27 Some members of women’s liberation went on to join WEL, while others moved in and out of

the so-called ‘femocracy’—the feminist bureaucracy—inaugurated under the Whitlam Labor government and considered to be a uniquely Australian style of feminism. Even so, how one positioned oneself in the feminist landscape still mattered. Many activists consciously insisted on the label ‘women’s liberationist’, initially eschewing the term ‘feminism’ itself as overly ‘bourgeois’ and ‘respectable’.28 The movement’s distinctive politics have since been reiterated by some of its most prominent members, concerned that its legacy might be overlooked. Indeed, more so than many social movements, women’s liberation has been active in constructing its own history. By the late 1970s, Australian activists were already issuing their own accounts of the movement and groups had begun to set up dedicated women’s liberation archives.29 Since then, both prominent and less well-known activists have produced memoirs, anthologies and organisational histories.30 Furthermore, many of the early scholarly accounts of women’s liberation and the second wave more generally were written by those who were participants or at least sympathetic observers. Yet despite these efforts to preserve the historical memory of women’s liberation, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, several prominent Australian scholars issued warnings that the movement’s history was at risk of being forgotten. Philosopher Jean Curthoys described a process of ‘feminist amnesia’ that, she argued, had resulted in the ‘suppression’ of the ‘liberationist’ politics of the 1970s.31 Meanwhile, historian Susan Magarey argued that women’s liberation’s history had been ‘obscured’ as a result of the ‘ascendance’ of liberal feminism and, with it, the subordination of the ‘socialist and anarchist dimension in feminist politics’.32 She has recently reiterated this concern and made a renewed appeal to remember ‘the exuberance, the joy for women in breaking the rules, behaving badly, in public—a feature of Women’s Liberation that seems to have been entirely obliterated from memory and history’.33 These concerns are not without some basis. Although women’s liberation was hardly ignored in early Australian accounts of the second wave, it also competed with histories of WEL and the femocrat experiment. Both of these featured prominently in the large body of scholarship on feminism and the state produced in the 1980s and 1990s, while WEL has

been the focus of several dedicated histories.34 Generational debates within feminism have also fuelled anxiety about the ‘forgetting’ of women’s liberation. Concerns that younger women have little appreciation of the struggles and achievements of women’s liberation—or of the second wave more broadly—have been expressed since at least the mid-1990s.35 But if former activists once worried that their efforts had gone unappreciated, the recent proliferation of research on Australian women’s liberation should provide some reassurance that this is far from the case.36 This development mirrors trends overseas, particularly in the United States, where a plethora of new studies have sought to place women’s liberation at the centre of historical inquiry.37 This book contributes to this growing body of work by highlighting the importance of children’s liberation to activists’ revolutionary vision. Most accounts of the Australian women’s movement do not mention children’s liberation as a specific dimension of feminist activism in the 1970s and it is only hinted at in the wider historiography of the era’s radical politics.38 When children are discussed, they typically appear as the subject of discrete campaigns—for example, in relation to child care,39 schooling,40 domestic violence41 and sexual abuse42—rather than a wider agenda of children’s liberation. This absence is mirrored in the extensive literature on women’s liberation in North America, as well as the smaller, though growing, body of work on the British movement. Even recent work on feminist children’s culture that has explicitly sought to reassess children’s place in the second wave, identifying them as both ‘central motivating forces’ for the movement and ‘central actors’ within it, has tended to focus on the importance of feminist efforts to counter early ‘sex-role socialisation’, rather than the broader critique of children’s oppression.43 What we have so far is a selective history of children’s place within the feminist movement. Much of the radical impetus behind feminist interventions into children’s lives has gone unrecognised. In the absence of such a history, a very different view of women’s liberation has been left unchallenged: that of the ‘anti-child’ feminist. While the figure of the child has often been—and continues to be—used against feminism, it was deployed with particular success in the 1970s. As North American historian Lauri Umansky notes, the stereotype of feminist

‘disdain for mothers and children’ materialised ‘almost simultaneously’ with the emergence of women’s liberation in the United States.44 In Australia, the idea that women’s liberation was ‘anti-child’ was one that similarly beleaguered the movement from its early days, so much so that activists felt compelled to respond. As early as 1972, Sydneysider Gillian Leahy, a member of the Mejane collective, struck out at the ‘mostly incorrect’ perception that women’s liberationists were ‘child-haters’ simply because they ‘reject the concept of women’s role as mother’.45 Despite such efforts, the stereotype of the ‘anti-child feminist’ has proven to be a lasting one, casting a long shadow over histories of the movement and feminist memory itself. North American historian Rosalyn Baxandall, who was active in women’s liberation in New York while a young mother, has lamented the fact that it ‘has become a cliché to brush off the women’s movement as anti-family and anti-child’ and that the movement’s ‘prochildren’s activities’ have subsequently been ‘erased’.46 Similarly, Australian historian Natasha Campo has shown how a dominant narrative of second-wave feminism more generally ‘as despising motherhood and damaging children’ formed in the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s and was reinforced by a wider generational debate about the ‘failure’ of 1970s feminism.47 The trope of the ‘anti-child’ feminist—the ultimate ‘straw feminist’—has proven difficult to displace, leaving a fraught legacy for contemporary feminism to navigate.48 As these accounts suggest, the stereotype is one that is inextricably bound up with the politics of maternity. Feminist critiques of motherhood and domesticity reflected a deep ambivalence around children and the potential obstacle they represented to women’s autonomy. Women’s liberationists highlighted the debilitating effects of women’s isolation in the home, the invisibility of women’s unpaid labour, the links between domesticity and sexual repression, and, above all, women’s vulnerability to male violence.49 This ambivalence was most pronounced in the early years of second-wave feminism: the period of what North American feminist and historian Ann Snitow calls the ‘demon texts’.50 The major ‘blockbusters’ of women’s liberation offered harsh critiques of motherhood, equating it with a loss of identity and autonomy for women. Furthermore, the right to ‘choose’ to be childless—indeed, ‘childfree’, as some activists in the 1970s

described their status—was central to second-wave feminism, encapsulated in calls for abortion on demand and access to contraception. Historians are now highly familiar with this critique. Yet, at the time, the arguments put forward by feminists were ‘remarkable’ given the normalisation of marriage and motherhood, and the increased emphasis placed on the maternal role following the Second World War.51 Women’s liberation could be considered a response to the contradictions of the postwar period, which saw increasing economic prosperity and education levels, with large numbers of women entering higher education for the first time, but a pronounced lack of opportunities for women to move into higherskilled and higher-paid work.52 Declining birth rates and access to reliable contraception with the launch of the pill in Australia in 1961 also made it possible to query motherhood as women’s ‘biological destiny’. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that women’s liberation met with forceful opposition. Anti-abortion activists were among the first to attack women’s liberation as anti-child. Right-to-life groups first began forming at a state level in the early 1970s and came together as a national organisation in 1973. Skilfully appropriating the language of human rights, they argued that the rights of the ‘unborn’ must be protected against the secular state, which had become beholden to the interests of feminists and other sexual revolutionaries.53 The conservative backlash became increasingly organised in the second half of the decade, with the establishment of two overtly anti-feminist groups: the Women’s Action Alliance (WAA), formed in 1975, and Women Who Want to Be Women (WWWW), established in 1979 by a group of dissidents who wanted the WAA to take a stronger stance on abortion. Both groups put themselves forward as the defenders of ‘homemakers’ and their children and, in the case of WWWW, followed the example of pro-life groups in linking abortion to the rights of the ‘unborn child’.54 Crucially, WWWW’s formation also took place in the context of wider conservative mobilisation around International Year of the Child (IYC) in 1979.55 Conservative groups’ efforts to co-opt IYC—coinciding with the end of the period traced in this book—in turn prompted a counteroffensive by feminists and other radicals, but they would find it increasingly difficult to gain traction in the

context of this backlash and with the Fraser Coalition government’s hold on power now well established. However, it was not only due to attacks from conservative groups that the stereotype of the ‘anti-child feminist’ emerged. It is also clear from activists’ own accounts of the period that the choice to have children was a fraught one and that some mothers experienced hostility from other activists —including, in some cases, open disapproval of their decision to have children.56 Motherhood also represented one of second-wave feminism’s major fault lines in negotiating the politics of ‘difference’. Feminist analyses of ‘compulsory motherhood’ and the ‘housewife syndrome’ resonated strongly with its political base of middle-class and skilled working-class women, for whom the dominant model of ‘home-bound’ motherhood was a key barrier to entering the workforce.57 But these analyses were also one of the main reasons why many Indigenous activists came to see women’s liberation as a white movement and dissociated themselves from it, as I elaborate on further below. ‘While white women are fighting to get out of the kitchen, Black women are fighting to get into it’, Indigenous historian and Bidjara and Birri-Gubba Juru woman Jackie Huggins would later reflect.58 There is no doubt that the relationship between 1970s feminism and maternity was a ‘troubled’ one.59 Yet feminist ambivalence about motherhood by no means precluded activism around it, and nor did it exclude women’s liberationists from staking a claim on debates around childhood and children’s rights. Indeed, this book reveals that ambivalence about motherhood could itself be highly productive, creating space for new ways of thinking not just about women but children too. Equally, this account shows that we must also look beyond the maternal if we wish to fully account for the place of children in feminist politics during this period and beyond. The agenda of children’s liberation was a broad one and demanded action on multiple fronts if it was to achieve its full potential.

Which Child? The shifting definition of childhood across time and within different social, legal and political settings is axiomatic to the study of its history: the ‘exact parameters of when childhood ends’ are not easily agreed upon.60 This

ambiguity was also foundational to the politics of children’s liberation: indeed, Firestone took as her starting point French historian Philippe Ariès’ assertion that ‘childhood’ was an ‘invented’ concept.61 In this context, the term ‘children’ performed political work, underlining the ways in which both young children and adolescents were infantilised by adults. Childhood was understood to be a state of oppression shared by the young infant who was treated as the ‘property’ of their parents through to the high school student who was subject to the exercise of teachers’ authority. Yet, while children might share certain common interests irrespective of their age, they are not a homogenous group. Feminist scholars have long criticised the tendency to imagine the ‘universal child’ as male, white and middle class. Feminism itself is by no means impervious to this tendency, however; in seeking to retrace the history of children’s liberation, the question of ‘which child’ propelled feminist activism likewise arises.62 The question is especially significant given long-standing criticisms of women’s liberation as a white women’s movement, focused on white women’s issues —criticisms that hinge not only on questions of representation, but political preoccupations and priorities. Certainly, many women’s liberationists saw themselves as committed to the elimination of class and racial oppression, as well as sexual inequality. Influenced by their new left origins, activists observed the ‘double’ or ‘triple oppression’ of working-class, migrant and Indigenous women, as well as the anti-colonial struggles of women globally.63 Some were also actively involved in campaigns ranging from Aboriginal land rights to the anti-apartheid movement during this period and, indeed, drew political inspiration from these causes.64 In any case, while many of the first women’s liberation groups were formed by university students and middle-class professionals, activists quickly sought to build a more diverse base. The strong influence of socialist politics and involvement of trade union activists saw an early emphasis on recruiting working-class women, with campaigns around equal pay and investigations into working conditions in factories serving to reinforce the movement’s credentials on this front.65 From the mid-1970s, the establishment of women’s health centres and refuges, many of them in suburban areas, also served to extend the reach of the movement.

Nor did women’s liberation only attract white, Anglo women. Aboriginal activist Pat Eatock’s involvement in Canberra Women’s Liberation is, for example, well recorded. Eatock joined the group in early 1972 and, when she ran in the federal election later that year, it provided important support for her campaign.66 Despite the predominance of Anglo women, wide-ranging examples of migrant women’s involvement can also be found, from early contributions by women from Russian and Italian backgrounds in the Melbourne women’s liberation journal Vashti’s Voice67 to the formation of Turkish and Spanish women’s groups at the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre in Sydney within months of its opening in March 1974.68 Even so, women’s liberation’s record in addressing questions of race and ethnicity proved to be a subject of ongoing contention both within the movement and outside it. Some migrant women reported a lack of awareness of cultural differences, as well as barriers to participation due to language difficulties or lack of family or other support networks. Others went further and called out overt forms of discrimination and exclusion.69 Moreover, while some migrant women closely identified with women’s liberation, others queried the movement’s ability to address migrant-specific issues and resisted the view of ‘an exclusive or singular theory of oppression’.70 They directed their political energy into other organisations that they saw as more receptive to their concerns, including those pertaining to children, such as child care, the recognition of migrant languages in the school curriculum, and domestic and family violence. This included forming new advocacy groups and services focused specifically on migrant women and children’s needs, such as the Australian Migrant Women’s Association, established in Sydney in 1974, and the country’s first migrant women’s refuge, which opened under the auspices of the Italian Assistance Association, Co As It, in Melbourne in 1975.71 Indigenous women’s assessments of women’s liberation were even more critical. While some, such as Eatock, saw value in joining women’s liberation, others expressed significant reservations about its relevance to Indigenous women and cautioned white women against purporting to speak on their behalf. Indeed, some argued strongly that feminism was not only irrelevant but potentially damaging to their interests, given other pressing

considerations such as land rights, health care and housing. In one of the best-known analyses, published in the national feminist journal Refractory Girl in September 1976, Aboriginal lawyer Pat O’Shane summarised the position of many Indigenous women: ‘our major fight is racism’ not sexism, she emphasised.72 Criticisms of ‘white feminism’ have since been charted in more detail in the work of a range of Indigenous scholars, but Goenpul woman and scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s assessment remains one of the most influential. She identifies the problem as one of subject position. While women’s liberationists acknowledged that other sources of oppression had an impact on women’s lives, the ‘white, middle-class woman’ continued— and continues—to be positioned as the unquestioned, normative subject of feminism.73 Accordingly, the movement’s priorities, such as equal pay, child care and abortion, remain tethered to the experiences of white women. This critique can also be extended to the feminist agenda of children’s liberation, particularly in so far as it pivoted around questions of motherhood, family and reproduction. Where white feminists called for women and children to be liberated from the nuclear family, many Indigenous women emphasised that it was the denial of their familial ties and maternal identities by white society that was oppressive, as evidenced in the long history of forced child removal, alongside other forms of white control of Indigenous women’s fertility, including forced abortion and sterilisation (see Chapter 4).74 Furthermore, Indigenous women identified other pressing issues for children to those identified by white feminists, including access to culturally-appropriate education, nutrition and health care—issues arising from systemic forms of racial discrimination and dispossession.75 In some cases, Indigenous activists raised these issues in feminist forums, including at the landmark Women and Politics Conference held in Canberra in 1975 as part of International Women’s Year. A list of demands circulated to delegates identified forced sterilisation in particular as a subject of concern, as well as asserting the broader right of Indigenous women to determine what is ‘best about our own culture and family’.76 However, for the most part, these concerns were ones that Indigenous women addressed through their own channels. They worked alongside

Indigenous men in newly established Aboriginal-controlled legal and medical services, established their own bodies such as the National Council of Aboriginal and Islander Women (formed in 1972), and participated in a range of local initiatives focused on children. For example, in Sydney, a group of women set up Murawina, an Aboriginal-controlled preschool and child-care centre, in Redfern in 1973, and in 1976, Yorta Yorta woman Mollie Dyer played a leading role in the establishment of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, which worked to advocate for Aboriginal control over adoption practices. It provided a model for similar bodies in other states and territories to follow, eventually leading to the formation of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) in 1981.77 The feminist agenda of children’s liberation was inevitably a product of the interests, activities and blind spots of its key participants, and is far from the only perspective from which claims for children’s rights might be viewed during this period. While this book suggests that this agenda did provide a range of openings for women’s liberation to address issues of race and ethnicity, they do not emerge as consistent concerns in the examination that follows, while some initiatives traced here were explicitly critiqued for their failure to consider these intersecting oppressions. Furthermore, this book is for the most part an account of white women’s activism—it remains the case that many Indigenous and migrant women chose to organise in groups outside of the women’s liberation movement, and the full extent of their political activity is not captured in the sources drawn on here.

Children’s Liberation in the Archive Historians are fortunate to have access to a wealth of records, collected and preserved by feminist activists, with which to reconstruct the history of Australian women’s liberation. The starting point for this study is the material contained in the multiple archival collections produced by members of women’s liberation which makes it possible to distinguish this movement from other feminisms of the period. This book benefits from the remarkable collections of records of individual activists and women’s liberation groups held in libraries and university archives in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

Feminist publications are another significant source for this book. As Lake has observed, women’s liberation was an ‘intensely literary’ movement: activists read and wrote prolifically.78 It was also a transnational political and literary movement. For this reason, this study makes extensive use of both Australian and overseas publications, including theoretical works, fiction, self-help texts and anthologies, and especially the many journals, newspapers and newsletters produced by women’s liberationists— mined here not just for the letters and articles from contributors that provide a valuable gauge of recurrent feminist concerns, but for the seemingly more mundane items, such as group reports and meeting notices, that afford insight into the logistics of feminist organising. Finally, this book draws on the personal testimony of activists, including autobiographical writings and oral history interviews with feminist mothers, teachers, cultural activists and policymakers.79 I use these sources not only to fill gaps in the written record, but to better understand how women situate themselves in relation to the feminist past. Indeed, these sources are a powerful reminder of the complex emotions attached to this period, evidenced in the sometimes-conflicting views expressed by activists as they reflect back on the movement’s success and failures—for, as we will see, the project of children’s liberation was far from straightforward. These sources have their limitations. Despite the careful and concerted efforts of activists to preserve the movement’s records, the Australian ‘feminist archive’ remains a highly fragmented one, spread across multiple locations and typically favouring what feminist scholars Margaret Henderson and Maryanne Dever have called the ‘south-eastern axis’: Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide.80 These sources are also weighted towards the movement’s best-known figures, a problem compounded by difficulties in tracing authorship; in keeping with the movement’s collectivist politics, names were often left off publications or only first names were used, in turn making it difficult to identify less prominent individuals. The focus of this book on women’s liberation— rather than a broader range of feminisms—also means that these sources tend to emphasise the perspectives of white women. Writing a history of children’s liberation as part of feminist politics presents further challenges. As historians of childhood have long

recognised, the process of ‘recovering’ children’s own experiences and voices is rarely straightforward and requires innovative uses of the archive.81 For the most part, this book privileges the experiences of those women activists who saw themselves as advancing the agenda of children’s liberation on behalf of children, an irony that was not lost on activists at the time. Where possible, however, I seek to bring children’s voices into the historical record, making use of varied sources to highlight their interventions into feminist debates, from the occasional letter or article featured in feminist journals through to the records of feminist high school groups. Brought together here, these diverse sources illuminate the rich history of feminism and children’s liberation in the 1970s. The following chapters reveal the diversity of approaches that activists took to the subject of children’s liberation, while also underlining the collective effort that was invested in this goal. Chapter 1 starts by tracing the genesis of children’s liberation in theoretical terms, focusing on the Australian reception of Shulamith Firestone’s ground-breaking work, before examining the new demands the concept of children’s liberation placed on women to recognise children’s agency and facilitate their political participation. Each of the next four chapters examines a discrete arena of feminist activism, demonstrating how key principles of children’s liberation laid out by Firestone and her liberationist contemporaries were put into practice in Australia. Chapter 2 focuses on feminist critiques of the nuclear family and traces activists’ efforts to implement more collective forms of childrearing in their own families and neighbourhoods. In Chapter 3, I turn to the process of childhood socialisation, which women’s liberationists identified as critical not only to the perpetuation of sex-role stereotypes but broader attitudes of obedience and social conformity. This chapter highlights the varied methods they adopted to counteract this process, from the production of non-sexist books to the establishment of alternative schools. Chapter 4 concerns the contentious subject of children’s sexuality and uncovers feminists’ pivotal role in promoting sex education and the expansion of sexual health services to teenage girls. The problem of sexual violence is in turn examined in Chapter 5, alongside other forms of child abuse, providing

a fresh perspective on the development of women’s refuges and rape crisis services, as well as feminist campaigns around child welfare. What emerges from these chapters is a much more complex view of the relationship between feminism and children’s rights than has been suggested to date—a far cry from the stereotype of the ‘anti-child feminist’ that has for so long overshadowed the movement’s legacy. Throughout this book, I reveal the breadth of applications of children’s liberation and the considerable hopes invested in this ideal, while also acknowledging the tensions that emerged in putting it into practice. Key feminist ideas, discourses and practices were extended to children in innovative ways that positioned them as important participants in the making of this feminist future. Far from a marginal concern, children emerge here as central to the vision of social transformation articulated by women’s liberationists in the 1970s.

Chapter 1 Why Children’s Liberation?

The room was packed when a group of women gathered in Sydney to discuss ‘women’s role’ in society and ‘how the oppression of women benefits capitalism’.1 The inaugural public meeting of Sydney Women’s Liberation, held on the evening of 14 January 1970, was followed by a flourishing of local groups as word about the new movement began to spread in left-wing circles. The Glebe Group was one of the first to form, and its meeting place—a shopfront on Glebe Point Road, close to the University of Sydney—soon became the unofficial headquarters of Sydney Women’s Liberation.2 A description of the group’s ethos, published a year later in the inaugural edition of the feminist newspaper Mejane, explained that it contained ‘diverse attitudes and outlooks’, but that overall, it took a ‘radical perspective’, believing that ‘the liberation of women involves the liberation of everyone in society so that no class or caste dominates the rest’.3 In emphasising their commitment to the ‘liberation of everyone’, the Glebe Group expressed a common sentiment within the early Australian women’s liberation movement. Influenced by the new left’s calls for ‘human liberation’ or ‘people’s liberation’, its goal was an ambitious one: nothing less than a complete transformation in social relations would suffice.4 In keeping with this ambition, it was not long before women’s

liberationists began to turn their attention to the status of children, prompted in no small part by the arrival of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). Although it was by no means the only influence at work, Firestone’s book occupied a critical place in discussions of children’s liberation within the Australian movement, especially during its early years, and warrants special attention. The enthusiastic reception it garnered is all the more noteworthy given the tendency in subsequent childhood studies scholarship to treat Firestone as an exceptional figure or feminist outlier with respect to her views on children’s liberation.5 This chapter begins by tracing the theoretical origins of children’s liberation, focusing on Australian activists’ responses to Firestone’s work, while also pointing to a range of other transnational influences on their discussions. In the second half of the chapter, I move on to consider the impact of this new paradigm on feminists’ organisational forms and practices. Australian activists quickly recognised that, if the movement were to legitimately claim that it was a project of both women’s and children’s liberation, they would also need to include children in their political activities. These efforts have so far received little attention in movement histories; indeed, more commonly, where children’s presence has been addressed, the focus has been on their exclusion from movement spaces, either through a lack of child-care provision or more explicit means, especially in the case of boy children.6 Yet, as we will see, women’s liberationists sought to include children across many strands of their political activities, from taking their children to street protests to supporting girls’ activism in schools. The new possibilities for political action engendered by children’s liberation would in turn be one of the movement’s most important legacies.

Theorising Children’s Liberation In September 1971, an intriguing article entitled ‘Free the Children’ appeared in On Dit, the student newspaper at the University of Adelaide. It entreated readers to consider the unenviable position of children in modern society. ‘We now have a very developed and refined notion of children as being inferior to adults’, the author reflected. ‘They do not have the same

political and economic rights, for example. Children are rigidly separated from most adult preoccupations and activities, and they are patronized and talked down to’. This troubling situation was all too often justified as a necessary—indeed, natural—consequence of children’s physical and emotional immaturity. But the exclusion of children from adult society, the article asserted, was not inevitable: It should be pointed out immediately that it is necessary to abandon our idea that childhood must necessarily be segregated from the mainstream of social behaviour … the notion and the reality of childhood constituting a separate sphere of existence from adulthood is an historical one, and one that is still developing.7 The author of the article was Anne Summers, a recent graduate and, along with Anna Yeatman and Julie Ellis, one of the founding members of Adelaide Women’s Liberation. Inspired by events in the United States, the three women had begun collecting material on ‘women’s role in society’ two years earlier.8 They held their first official meeting in December 1969.9 Summers remained involved in the burgeoning women’s liberation movement in Adelaide throughout 1970, but moved to Sydney to take up postgraduate study at the University of New South Wales the following year. It was here that Summers met with John Hooker, an editor at Penguin, and proposed the concept of a book on Australian women’s oppression.10 Published in 1975, Damned Whores and God’s Police quickly become a bestseller and made Summers one of Australia’s most prominent feminist figures. Just as Summers’ celebrated text would emphasise the historical origins of women’s oppression, so too she argued in her article, ‘Free the Children’, that the subject of childhood needed to be viewed in these terms. Until around the fourteenth century, she claimed, children were simply regarded as ‘small adults’. They ‘were not treated as a separate and inferior caste: there were no special clothes, toys, games and speech’; rather, children simply ‘shared most activities’ with adults.11 Over time, however, they had come to be seen as a distinct group, in need of special treatment and attention from ‘experts’ such as paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock, author of

the internationally renowned handbook, Baby and Child Care (1946). ‘We should be alive to the numerous new professions, industries and consumer patterns that the concept of childhood has, most profitably, engendered’, Summers cautioned.12 Although she did not cite him, Summers’ argument was based on the work of French historian Philippe Ariès. First published in English in 1962, Ariès’ book, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960), contended that childhood was not an impermeable phenomenon, but a distinct feature, or ‘invention’, of modernity. Ariès connected this transformation in children’s social status with two key social institutions: the emergence of the nuclear family and, from the nineteenth century onwards, the expansion of compulsory schooling. While Ariès’ account has since been contested, his book proved foundational for subsequent analyses of childhood as a ‘social construct’, with its influence extending well beyond the discipline of history.13 It is unclear whether Summers had read Ariès’ book. More likely she took inspiration from Firestone’s chapter on children’s liberation in The Dialectic of Sex, which discussed Ariès’ thesis at some length. Born in 1945, Firestone had been active in the new left from her early twenties and co-founded the first women’s liberation group in New York in 1968. She began writing The Dialectic of Sex in 1969 and it was published in the United States in October 1970. It went on to become one of the celebrated feminist texts of the year, along with Australian expatriate Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and fellow North American Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. But it was not widely available in Australia until 1971, after the paperback edition was released. That year, the first reviews and excerpts of the book appeared in feminist and related periodicals. Summers’ article, which cited The Dialectic of Sex repeatedly, provided one of the earliest renditions of Firestone’s theory of children’s liberation. Firestone’s critique was a product of circumstances. While writing The Dialectic of Sex, she was loaned a copy of Ariès’ book by fellow New York women’s liberationist and historian Rosalyn Baxandall. It proved to be a serendipitous discovery, so much so that when Baxandall asked for her copy back, Firestone refused to return it. ‘[She] said she had better use for it than I did’, Baxandall later recalled. ‘She did, as I saw in her book.’14

Firestone was clearly taken by Ariès’ account and, like many at the time, reproduced his argument about the historical evolution of childhood as a ‘separate’ category in largely uncritical terms.15 But where Ariès argued that the ‘separation’ of children from adult society was a broadly positive shift, Firestone likened this process to their ‘segregation’.16 The modern phenomenon of childhood, she argued, was no more than the ‘pseudoemancipation’ of children.17 The ‘myth’ of childhood and the artificial age division it created represented the final form of oppression to be overcome. Indeed, she denounced the concept of childhood as having reduced children to the status of ‘almost another race’.18 Such language had particular potency in the North American context, connecting with the civil rights and Black Power movements. It also reflected women’s liberation’s own debt to these movements, albeit in a form that was also open to criticism as white appropriation.19 Firestone presented a detailed analysis of children’s oppression. She located the problem first and foremost in their physical and economic dependence on adults. This situation was a product of both biology—the ‘natural physical inequality between children and adults’—and society, with children’s inherent weaknesses ‘reinforced’ by culture. While some degree of dependence on adults was inevitable, at least for infants, children’s reliance on adults was socially exaggerated and ultimately used to justify their ongoing subordination to adults, including via children’s legal status as ‘minors’, their position as the ‘property’ of their parents in the nuclear family and their lack of independent income. For Firestone, this dependence disenfranchised children and made them vulnerable to physical abuse.20 Curiously, Firestone did not raise the subject of child sexual abuse as a consequence of familial dependence and parental ownership, although this point would soon be made by other feminists (see Chapter 5). She instead emphasised children’s sexual repression, namely their ‘forced asexuality’, as well as the ‘subtle psychological pressures’ of the nuclear family.21 Firestone also viewed the education system as a key factor in children’s oppression, likening schools to ‘jails’ that segregated children from adults, as well as from children of other ages.22 Furthermore, she lamented the increasing supervision of children’s recreational activities, to which she attributed a loss of creativity and freedom.23

Importantly, Firestone argued that these forms of childhood oppression did not apply universally. Historically the ‘myth’ of childhood had come later to the ‘lower class’, she argued, and aspects had ‘never stuck’.24 Indeed, in modern America, working-class and ‘ghetto’ children were still able to ‘escape’ some of its force. By virtue of necessity, they were more likely to be left by adults to their own devices and, accordingly, continued to enjoy a greater level of social freedom than their more affluent peers— though she emphasised that they were ‘still dependent, and oppressed as an economic class’.25 This acknowledgement that childhood was not a uniform experience was a significant one, if also revealing of a tendency to romanticise poverty and failure to consider the ways in which white, middle-class children and their families were comparatively protected from forms of state surveillance and control other than the school.26 Though by no means unproblematic, the analysis of children’s oppression outlined by Firestone presented a powerful challenge to the status quo and, in particular, to assumptions about adults’ protective role in relation to children. Yet her work did more than catalogue the various ways in which children’s oppression manifested. Its most significant contribution was to connect the oppression of children and women. Firestone proclaimed: ‘Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath … The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression.’27 In this vein, Firestone noted important parallels in the way women’s and children’s oppression manifested. She pointed out that both groups were ‘mythologised’ in a similar way—for example, through an emphasis on their sexual ‘purity’. They shared an experience of being patronised: they were expected to be ‘cute’ and accommodating, were considered to be ‘mentally deficient’ and treated as incompetents.28 Most importantly, Firestone argued that the oppression of women and children was interconnected due to their respective positions in the nuclear family. On the one hand, the ‘increase and exaggeration’ of children’s dependence and denial of their autonomy ensured ‘woman’s bondage to motherhood’.29 On the other, as adults—more specifically, as mothers—women were in a position of power over children and participated directly in their oppression. They played a particularly insidious role, she argued, in the psychological

formation of children, determining ‘what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form’.30 Accordingly, Firestone proposed parallel solutions to the problem of women’s and children’s oppression: ‘Our final step must be the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood themselves … clearing the way for a fully human condition.’31 Firestone’s emphasis on the shared oppression of women and children gave her theory of children’s liberation a distinctive feminist quality. Firestone was, however, far from alone in taking up the cause of children’s liberation, and her views need to be understood in the context of other radical critiques of childhood put forward in this period. The most fullyfledged arguments for children’s liberation were presented several years later in the now better-known North American texts, Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children (1974), by psychologist and educator Richard Farson, and Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (1974), by child educator John Holt. Like Firestone, they drew on Ariès’ insights, equating children’s separation from adult society with their oppression. Indeed, Holt went so far as to suggest that most young people experienced childhood as a ‘prison’.32 Both Farson and Holt also argued that children should enjoy the same rights as adults, including the right to vote, work, own property, choose their guardian and enjoy sexual freedom. Their work formed part of a wider body of critical literature on the status of children in modern capitalist society. Holt’s arguments in particular built on his longstanding interest in radical education theory. His earlier publications, starting with How Children Fail (1964), had critiqued conventional approaches to schooling for fostering a relationship to learning based on obedience rather than curiosity. Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation (1964) and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) took the case further, arguing that schools were simply a vehicle for producing social conformity and acceptance of authority in children, while Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s anti-colonial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), criticised the paternalistic dynamics underpinning what he called the ‘banking model’ of education, in which ‘knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing’.33 These works echoed—and in some cases,

explicitly referenced—earlier educational texts such as A.S. Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childrearing (1960), about the experimental school in England he founded in 1924, and Italian educator Maria Montessori’s writings on the benefits of free learning and exploration for young children. Where radical education theorists focused on the school system, others directed their attention to the nuclear family. Some of the earliest literature of the counterculture and gay liberation movements queried the sexual oppression of children, with a particular focus in the latter case on their socialisation through the heterosexual nuclear family. University of Sydney lecturer Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971) declared that the nuclear family perpetuated a model of ‘sexual role playing’ that was ‘either fully heterosexual—or, except in special cases, will appear so to their children’.34 The liberation of the child from the ‘authoritarian’ structure of the nuclear family also emerged as a key theme in the writings of radical sociology and psychiatry, including R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967), which sought to expose the violent basis of familial love and asserted its links to madness. In Australia, Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was read alongside these other radical texts, many of which featured on feminist reading lists, were sold at feminist and left-wing bookshops or were reviewed in the feminist press. In addition, key features of children’s oppression elucidated by Firestone—including children’s dependent status within the nuclear family, the role of social conditioning, the assumption of children’s sexual purity and their vulnerability to physical violence—were touched on in the North American and British literature on women’s liberation enthusiastically consumed by Australian activists and subsequently deployed in local analyses, as we will see in later chapters. Together they made for a disturbing view of children’s lives. Even so, Firestone undoubtedly went the furthest in explicitly connecting children’s oppression to women’s oppression, and her work quickly came to be seen by many as an authoritative statement on the subject. A month after Summers’ article was published in On Dit, Canberra activist Biff Ward’s favourable review of The Dialectic of Sex appeared in Mejane, nominating Firestone’s political critique of childhood as one of the

‘most provoking’ aspects of the book. Ward was not just struck by Firestone’s analysis of children’s current circumstances, but her blueprint for the future too. The final chapter of the book outlined alternative ways of structuring society, including the establishment of communal households, the provision of an independent income for children and the replacement of formal schooling with learning exchanges open to those of all ages. Ward noted that Firestone portrayed ‘in a most exhilarating way how children could be included in the real world’.35 Fellow Canberra activist Sara Dowse —an early member of Canberra Women’s Liberation who went on to head the Women’s Affairs Section in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 1974 to 1977—was similarly impressed. She would later recall that Firestone’s analysis of children’s liberation was ‘one of the most interesting things’ about the book: ‘[S]uddenly very firm notions—fixed notions—like childhood and the family became, for me, mutable.’36 The most extensively documented discussions of the book took place in Summers’ hometown of Adelaide. In August 1971, the local women’s liberation newsletter Liberation reported that debate at a recent meeting on child-care centres had revolved around children, ‘their rights, their needs – their liberation’. At a follow-up meeting on 30 September, they planned to discuss how women and children were ‘linked’ not just through their positions in the family, ‘but by the fact that neither are regarded as fully human in a paternalist society’. Firestone’s chapter and Summers’ forthcoming article were listed as suggested reading.37 The same edition of Liberation featured a two-page spread on ‘Children’s Liberation’, in which key sections from Firestone’s book were reproduced, alongside extracts from texts by Holt and Illich—a prime example of the way in which her text was read alongside other critical literature on childhood.38 Australian feminists were much less enthused by Firestone’s advocacy of artificial reproduction, for which she is now best remembered. In the opening chapter of The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that pregnancy and childbirth were a root cause of the sex-based division of labour and women’s oppression, and proposed artificial reproduction as a means to free women from the burden of biology. Appropriating historical materialist analysis, she asserted that the ultimate goal of the ‘feminist revolution’ must be ‘not just the elimination of male privilege but the sex distinction

itself’ through the ‘(temporary) seizure of control of human fertility’.39 The argument fit with her belief in the liberating potential of technology—she proposed artificial reproduction as part of a broader vision of a future society based on cybernation.40 However, many women’s liberationists in Australia and elsewhere were less convinced of its merits. Some felt that the concept was at odds with feminist attempts to ‘reclaim’ the female body.41 Others were sceptical of her ‘technological determinism’.42 Australian historian Lyndall Ryan, a founding member of Sydney Women’s Liberation, would later recall that she and her sister Julia Ryan were ‘alienated by the prospect of incubator babies’, although their mother, the seasoned political campaigner and trade unionist Edna Ryan, was sympathetic.43 Even Ward shared these reservations; ‘I personally recoil at test-tube babies’, she declared in her otherwise enthusiastic review of The Dialectic of Sex.44 These early responses anticipated feminist critiques of IVF in the 1980s and 1990s, as a result of which Firestone’s work was increasingly positioned as ‘naïve’ in its analysis of the subject.45 Yet, while many Australian readers may have expressed unease at Firestone’s advocacy of artificial reproduction, this did not stop them from embracing other aspects of her revolutionary program, not least of all her broader call for the equalisation of adult-child relations. For Firestone, children’s liberation entailed not just a ‘diffusion’ of childbearing and childrearing responsibilities to wider society, but the full recognition of children’s capacity for ‘self-determination’.46 This goal would not be easily realised; indeed, Firestone herself expressed some scepticism about the capacity of children to advocate for themselves under existing circumstances, cautioning that women activists ‘will have to, one last time, do it for them’.47 Activists in Australia were more optimistic about the prospects for children’s political inclusion in the immediate term and, in the coming years, they worked towards building a movement in which children were recognised as equal participants. This would be the first test of the theory’s application on the ground.

Organising for Children’s Liberation

In July 1971, three months before Mejane published Ward’s review of The Dialectic of Sex, the newspaper cited her eight-year-old daughter Genevieve (Genny) in a three-page spread on ‘Children and Liberation’. Compiled by postgraduate student and Mejane collective member Suzanne Bellamy, the article contained interviews with five children and touched on a wide range of subjects: their parents, friends, teachers, discipline, sex and finance.48 Many of the children’s responses would have made for troubling reading. Women’s liberationists’ concerns about the insidious effects of conventional sex roles were borne out in the conversations, from five-year old Alison’s obsession with ‘pretty clothes’ to seven-year-old Terry’s tale of a teacher using a feather duster to discipline her male students (at least they were spared the cane, unlike his older peers, he noted). ‘If you don’t think girls and boys learn to be different, if you don’t think society moulds its own generation, then read these interviews’, Bellamy urged. Yet the situation was not without hope. ‘Two of these children are beginning to question what they are, who they belong to, where they fit, and what they’re being trained for’, she noted. ‘Their frank questioning and critical observation of their parents has led them to see their own interests as being in opposition, at least different, not catered for, often actually denied by the social unit within which they are reared.’49 Genny Macdougall was one of the two interviewees referred to. With her friend, nine-year-old Katchen (Katie) Cheney, she had recently established a children’s liberation group to fight against ‘the way we were treated’. Parents and especially their teachers have ‘just got too much power over us’, Genny explained.50 The girls conceded that they were not yet a ‘movement’; nonetheless, they had already staged one backyard demonstration over summer and another one at school, where they ‘got into serious trouble’ for refusing to form lines at assembly. Well versed in the tactics of political organisation, Genny had visions of one day setting up a central meeting place, a shack ‘that at least 20 kids can fit into’, from which they would build their numbers.51 If Firestone provided Australian women’s liberationists with the theoretical rationale for children’s liberation, the presence of children like Genny and Katie within their ranks gave them grounds for optimism about its practical application. The girls’ actions received a ringing endorsement

from Bellamy, who heralded the group as a sign of a new political consciousness on the part of young people. ‘CHILDREN’S LIBERATION EXISTS’, she pronounced.52 Yet as Genny and Katie themselves noted, their capacity to take further political action was hampered by limited resources and social networks. To advance the cause of children’s liberation, they would need the support of sympathetic adults. It was therefore incumbent on women to act as ‘adult allies’ and provide opportunities for children to make their own political claims. This responsibility fell first and foremost on those members of the movement who were mothers. Their children quickly gained an appreciation of the logistics of political organising. For example, Robin Harper—daughter of sociologist Jan Harper, a founding member of the Box Hill Women’s Liberation Group and of the Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative (WMCLC) (see Chapter 3)—fondly recalled getting to know many of her mother’s activist friends at meetings that were regularly held at their family home in suburban Melbourne. ‘I used to really like kind of sitting quietly being unnoticed and listening to those meetings’, she later reflected.53 She and her sisters also routinely attended feminist protests, including annual International Women’s Day (IWD) marches, which peaked at several thousand protestors in the mid-1970s.54 Robin Harper and her sisters were not the only children to attend feminist rallies with their mother. IWD rallies were considered especially important for children’s political education. Held in Australia since at least 1928, they were an opportunity to introduce children to a longer feminist tradition and celebrate the historical roots of the movement. In the 1970s, children’s attendance at IWD rallies was discussed in the mainstream and feminist press, and their presence was captured in photographs of mothers carrying babies and pushing prams, and older children carrying homemade banners and placards.55 In some cases, the involvement of children took a more organised form. In 1972, a self-proclaimed children’s liberation group performed at the Petrie Plaza in Canberra, while the 1975 Sydney IWD march included a children’s float which carried the child participants from the Domain to Town Hall (see Figure 1).56 The presence of children at protests was not just a matter of their political education. It was also important for the movement’s public image;

having children take part gave feminists greater credibility when they claimed to speak on their behalf. Photographs of children at protests show them holding signs with messages implying their own support for feminist demands, a tactic that both played to and sought to subvert the idea of children as naive and politically neutral. At the Sydney IWD rally in 1972, one mother came prepared with a ‘[K]indergarten Power’ sign for her daughter, Kate. She revelled at the sight of men carrying children on their shoulders and wiping ‘puke off their jumpers’, while women publicly breastfed their babies at Hyde Park.57 Meanwhile, other women sunbaked topless; when confronted by the police, a conflict broke out and was brought to an end by an Aboriginal woman who ‘stood with bare breasts feeding her child’—a powerful display of maternal empowerment and solidarity across racial lines.58

Figure 1: Children’s float at the International Women’s Day rally, Sydney, March 1975. Tribune Collection, ON 160/Item 0048, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation.

Children were also strategically brought to protests centred on issues directly affecting mothers and children, such as child care, education and domestic violence. Their presence was especially significant in the campaign for access to abortion. As gender studies scholar Erica Millar has noted, Australian anti-abortion campaigners relied ‘exclusively’ on ‘foetocentric’ arguments about the rights of the ‘unborn child’ during this period, rather than claims about women’s rights, such as ‘abortion grief’, which they later incorporated into their rhetoric. One of their main tactics was the use of foetal images in their publicity materials.59 Women’s liberationists countered with their own arguments about the rights of children, stressing that they sought for each child to be a ‘wanted’ child. They also sought to ensure that mothers and their children appeared at the events they organised in support of the abortion cause. Jan Harper took part in one such protest, when a pro-life meeting was held at the Box Hill Town Hall in the mid-1970s. After handing out leaflets as people arrived, the group of women and children ‘walked in and sat at the back’ until the organisers began showing slides of foetuses, at which point they ‘all marched out again’ in protest.60 While protests represented the most obvious—and certainly the most public—manifestation of children’s participation within women’s liberation, their presence extended to other feminist spaces. Children were brought to some of the earliest women’s liberation conferences, prompting organisers of future events to put significant effort into organising child care. Most often, volunteers were enlisted to staff conference crèches—including leftwing men, whose willingness to help was viewed as a test of their commitment to women’s liberation. At larger conferences, child-care workers were hired and costs collectivised across attendees, a financial commitment that itself speaks to the movement’s efforts to accommodate the presence of mothers and their children.61 Children also took part in the social and cultural life that grew out of women’s liberation, attending events ranging from barbeques and picnics to women’s festivals and camps, and accompanying their mothers to women’s centres. Practical necessity was certainly one factor behind children’s presence in these spaces. Mothers often had little choice but to bring their children due to a lack of child-care alternatives, as they sometimes made clear to

fellow activists who found children’s presence disruptive. There were also ideological imperatives for including children. Activists sought to build a different kind of political space that did not insist on a rigid division between public and private life or on age separation. Accordingly, a notice for thenew women’s centre at Musgrave Road in Red Hill, Brisbane, published in the local newsletter, Women’s Liberation, in mid-1974, urged women to ‘Bring your children too’ for ‘Women’s Liberation means Children’s Liberation as well’.62 Feminist efforts to accommodate children in women’s centres provide some of the most telling evidence of activists’ desire to build a movement inclusive of mothers and children. For many activists, women’s centres were the ultimate embodiment of women’s space. North American urban studies scholar Daphne Spain observes that they performed a symbolic function: they were not just ‘bricks and mortar’ but ‘a conceived space of meaning and symbolism … [that] publicly announced women’s presence’.63 As hubs of both political and social life, women’s centres often began as collectively-owned spaces, paid for by members’ contributions and later funded through government grants. Women’s centres were also at least semi-permanent spaces. This meant that they needed to find ways to accommodate children’s presence on an ongoing basis, prompting consideration of the way these spaces were designed and operated, as well as the provision of child care. The evolving response to the presence of children at Women’s Liberation House in Sydney is a case in point. The centre opened in Alberta Street, Surry Hills, in May 1972 and the question of children’s presence very quickly became a consideration for activists. Although they do not appear to have been realised, there were plans that year to run an experimental overnight babysitting service at the centre.64 More successful was a series of designated activities organised at the centre. A ‘Children’s Liberation Day’ was initially held from 10.30 am to 2.30 pm on Saturday, 4 November 1972.65 Children’s craft days became a semi-regular event in 1973, with children of all ages urged to ‘bring wood, nails, hammers and bang away’, in keeping with the movement’s vision of non-sexist childrearing (see Chapter 3).66 With time, a more permanent space for children was sought and, by December 1973, a dedicated children’s room

had been set up to accommodate children within the centre.67 In this case, children were able to command significant resources.

Figure 2: Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, Leichhardt, 1975. National Archives of Australia: A6135, K2/6/75/15. Creating dedicated children’s spaces and providing child care became increasingly necessary as the context of women’s centres themselves began to change. While initially women’s centres functioned primarily as activist spaces, over time they began to perform a wider set of functions, including hosting women’s health, rape crisis and legal services. In such cases, there was a need to accommodate not just the children of activists, but also of women seeking assistance from these services. Anticipating this issue, the founders of the Leichhardt Women’s Health and Community Centre in Sydney—the first service of its kind in the country—established a working group focused on setting up a children’s area ahead of opening the centre on 8 March 1974, coinciding with International Women’s Day.68 By July 1975, other centres had followed suit and at least two, the Perth Women’s Health

and Community Centre and the Hunter Region Working Women’s Centre in Newcastle, had hired dedicated child-care workers.69 Importantly, these services were also one way in which women’s liberation expanded its reach into the community and broadened its own membership base. For example, migrant women and children’s health quickly emerged as key priorities at the Leichhardt centre, where thirty per cent of the initial clientele identified as from migrant backgrounds.70 The emphasis on accommodating children in women’s centres was not uncontested. Tensions emerged from time to time over the question of childless women’s obligations to participate in child care. One Melbourne activist, Alva Geikie, recalled attending a general meeting at the Women’s Liberation Centre at which it was argued that all women should be held responsible for the children of mothers who used the centre. She was indignant: ‘Although I agreed with social responsibility I was horrified. I thought, if that becomes the accepted attitude I’m out of here.’71 While Geikie had no objection to children attending the centre, she did query the expectation that all women assist with child care—a view she felt reflected a lack of respect for her right not to have children, a key principle of women’s liberation. In some cases, opposition to children’s presence was more overt. Restrictions on boys attending women’s centres and events are a prime example, but more general complaints of hostility towards children’s presence in these spaces also appeared over time. A Melbourne activist described the ‘humiliation’ of taking her children to the women’s centre and having ‘two of my sisters’ sit ‘only inches away from me discussing how much they disliked kids’.72 Mothers’ complaints in such cases were typically framed in terms of the failure of the movement to put its politics into practice. Excluding mothers and their children was, as one Sydney lesbian mother put it, ‘contrary to feminist theory’.73 The issue was not easily resolved, as it involved two competing feminist principles: on the one hand, the recognition of women’s right to be ‘childfree’, thereby challenging assumptions about their ‘natural’ maternal desires; on the other, a commitment to making feminist spaces accessible to mothers and their children.

Women’s liberationists’ efforts to reach out to children beyond their own ranks were less ideologically fraught. School visits were one of the first mechanisms used to achieve this goal and were organised as early as September 1970 in Canberra, where a successful visit to Telopea Park High School prompted activists to contact eight other schools that month.74 School visits by women’s liberationists in other cities are also recorded during the movement’s early years, including by Sydney activists in 1971 and by Perth activists in 1972.75 Through such visits, they sought to introduce children, and especially girls, to the principles and practices of the broader women’s liberation movement. As one Sydney activist, Linda Young, put it, school visits represented a unique opportunity to ‘spread the light’ to students, including in the suburbs.76 Young’s account of one such visit to Wiley Park Girls High School in March 1973 attests to activists’ high hopes that, once informed of women’s liberation’s goals, girls would assert themselves and their interests. The impromptu visit to the school—located in south-west Sydney, a predominantly working-class area with a growing migrant population— took place immediately following the landmark Women’s Commission. The commission was a joint ‘consciousness raising’ event held by women’s liberation and the Women’s Electoral Lobby over the weekend of 17–18 March and attended by over 400 women.77 Young was fuelled by emotion when she and two other women came up with the idea of visiting the school, where a friend and fellow activist, Marcia, was an English teacher. They hoped to generate interest and enthusiasm among the students in feminist ideas, and were not disappointed. The response of the school girls was ‘absolutely overwhelming’, Young wrote. The first class of the day was reluctant to leave and ‘begged that it not finish’. Subsequent groups had the ‘same tremendous response’ and, by lunchtime, a ‘mob’ had gathered in the playground to hear them speak.78 While the visit ultimately ended on a sour note after the headmistress instructed them to leave, Young was confident that they had made a profound impact. The ‘potential for consciousness raising in the schools is obvious’, she proclaimed.79 School visits were a useful tactic, but they also depended on activists being granted access and were organised intermittently. Feminist teachers, on the other hand, had the advantage of being able to work within the

school system on an ongoing basis. Feminist teachers introduced their students to the movement’s literature, incorporating well-known texts such as Greer’s The Female Eunuch in their lessons or, at the very least, ensuring that they were available in the school library.80 At the elite Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, a group of students were even interviewed about the book for a story on the ABC’s This Day Tonight during Greer’s Australian book tour in March 1972. Asked if the text presented a way of life that ‘appealed’ to them, the girls resoundingly agreed, with one student explaining that it offered ‘new ideas and different choices’ that needed to be ‘considered in relation to what you could say we’ve already been brainwashed with’.81 The discussion made for compelling viewing, as the show’s producer also seemed to appreciate. Grassroots literature also made its way into schools, including women’s liberation newspapers and journals, as did feminist films. In 1975, Sydney activist Gail Shelston compiled a list of recommended resources for use in the classroom. Shelston was the first women’s officer at the NSW Teachers Federation and oversaw its Women’s Action Program, one of the many beneficiaries of the Whitlam government’s funding for International Women’s Year (IWY). Her selection demonstrated the diversity of feminist materials promoted for use in schools, ranging from non-sexist children’s books to the early experimental films of the Sydney Women’s Film Group.82 By this point, some schools had even established their own women’s studies courses. Taperoo, Underdale and Nailsworth High Schools in Adelaide developed women’s studies courses in 1975, while a course created by the School Without Walls in Canberra gained formal accreditation in 1976 (see Chapter 3).83 Feminists also produced dedicated teaching materials for schools, some of which gained national circulation. One of the best-known kits was produced by the Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative, another recipient of IWY funding. Entitled Role Your Own (1976), it was aimed at fourth-form (Year 10) students and comprised a booklet and series of posters exploring topics such as school, work and sexuality.84 Like other WMCLC publications, it proved to be a success: a total of 10 000 copies of the booklet were produced, approximately half of which had already sold within the first eight months.85 Other widely used kits included the National

Youth Council of Australia’s If I Was a Lady, and Other Picture Stories (1975), WEL activist and children’s author Joyce Nicholson’s What Society Does to Girls (1975) and the Australian Union of Students’ School Days, School Days, Good Ol’ Sexist School Days: Combat Sexism Kit (1976), a collection of feminist resources and classroom activities.86 These developments helped to pave the way for more direct connections between schools and activist groups, with students sometimes even visiting local women’s centres for school projects or school newsletters. Perth activists were evidently pleased—if also somewhat bemused—when three students from a local college and ‘a very intelligent mother’ attended a women’s liberation meeting in April 1973 and taped the ‘lively’ discussion in preparation for a school assignment.87 Occasionally these encounters also opened up the possibility of recruiting high school students to the movement, fuelling their interest in feminism and prompting promises to attend new members’ meetings or upcoming protests. In some cities, activists were more proactive and attempted to organise high school students themselves. The anti-war movement had already helped spur a flourishing of high school activist groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s.88 Sydney women’s liberationists were amongst the first to recognise the potential to build on this phenomenon. As early as January 1971, at a women’s liberation conference held over the Australia Day long weekend in Sydney, high school students were nominated as a potential target for feminist recruitment.89 Several months later, a pamphlet exhorting students to march with women’s liberation at the upcoming May Day protest was distributed.90 That same year, a sex education pamphlet distributed by Brisbane activists at school gates (see Chapter 4) included an invitation to join women’s liberation or to start their own groups.91 These efforts were rewarded by a smattering of feminist high school groups in the mid-1970s. The first recorded group formed in Sydney, holding their inaugural meeting on 23 July 1972 at Women’s Liberation House.92 For a period, the group met on a fortnightly basis at the centre and also ran a separate art group.93 In early 1973, it reported that it had members at several schools and was looking to expand its base, extending an invitation to ‘any primary school women interested’.94 But the group was ultimately short-lived and appears to have disbanded by 1974, a pattern

repeated by groups that formed in other cities, such as the Secondary Students Group in Melbourne (mid-1974–1975) and the Feminist High School Group in Brisbane (late 1975–1977).95 The short lifespans of these groups were not in themselves altogether unusual, although they were perhaps especially prone to membership turnover; periods of inactivity often coincided with older girls leaving the groups when they finished school. None of these groups proved especially enduring. Nevertheless, their establishment brought greater visibility to high school students within the women’s liberation movement and made it clear that they had distinct interests. Comprising students from multiple schools, the groups sought to spread feminist ideals to their peers, highlighting pertinent issues such as sex-segregated school subjects and inadequate sex education and discrimination against pregnant teenagers (see Chapter 4). They articulated what North American scholar Kera Lovell has described as high school feminists’ ‘double consciousness of being both a disenfranchised teenager and a sexually objectified young women [sic]’.96 Members of the Brisbane group made this point themselves, noting when they spoke at the Sexism and Schooling Conference in Adelaide in 1976 that their paper was unique among those presented at the conference in being ‘from the perspective of feminist high school girls’.97 Feminist high school groups represented the most organised manifestation of children’s activism within women’s liberation, albeit in a form limited to girls. However, they were not the only forum through which children were represented. Feminist periodicals regularly published pieces by high school students and were an especially important outlet for those who felt isolated. In 1974, for example, Vashti’s Voice featured letters from Melbourne students Maria De Leo, who expressed her frustrations at her classmates’ apathy about sexism,98 and Bill Clarke, whose teachers and peers ‘rubbish me because I believe in Women’s Liberation’.99 The journal provided both students with a space where they could connect with others who shared their concerns—or ‘sympathetic mentors’, as North American historian Lori Rotskoff puts it, writing about children’s letters to the popular feminist magazine Ms. during this period.100 Younger children were also represented on occasion. The editors of the Sydney-based journal

Womanspeak included a dedicated ‘Kidspeak’ column in their inaugural edition, suggesting that they may have envisioned publishing material by children on a regular basis, although this did not eventuate. In this particular instance, Womanspeak featured a short story about a fight between a male and female dinosaur, written by Lisa, described as ‘a seven year old woman’, a designation that not only foregrounded her gender but her age.101 Children also appeared as speakers at protests and conferences. Among the 138 speakers recorded as having testified at the Women’s Commission in Sydney—the same event that had inspired Young’s school visit—was a ten-year-old school girl, who ‘announced gravely from a written sheet of paper: “I think my school is too much interested in turning me out as a lady who knows about sewing but not much else.”’102 Several high school students also spoke, and their participation would again be sought at later events held in Sydney in 1974 and 1975, partly modelled on the March 1973 event, including one focused on the subject of education, the Women and Girls: Our Experiences in the Schools forum held in September 1974. In keeping with the title, advertising for the event was directed to school girls and reduced-price entry was offered.103 The inclusion of children in these forums was important on several levels. Perhaps most obviously, it served to strengthen feminist claims about the insidious nature of sex-role conditioning. Hearing children attest to the negative effects of sex-role stereotypes no doubt had a powerful validating effect, reinforcing to women the necessity of further action in this arena (see Chapter 3). At the same time, children’s presence made it difficult to ignore broader questions of children’s liberation. The time and energy that activists invested in ensuring that children were represented in various political forums—whether by facilitating their participation at conferences and events, or featuring their contributions in movement publications—in turn helped to ensure that their views were considered in the interventions that activists devised. Even so, many would have acknowledged that their efforts to include children at an organisational level fell short of their aspirations. In practice, women still routinely found themselves acting on behalf of children—as Firestone had predicted—raising the question of whether their own political

strategies simply reproduced the forms of adult power over children that they were committed to eliminating. As long as those institutions feminists associated with the oppression of children remained unchanged, it seemed that any attempts to empower children would remain piecemeal. Their goal of empowering children at a political level could not, in this sense, be separated from their efforts to transform broader social structures, starting with the nuclear family, the focus of the next chapter.

Chapter 2 Free Mum, Free Dad, Free Me, Free Child Care

‘One thing that is obvious is that the family as we know it oppresses all its members’, declared Adelaide women’s liberationist Judy Gillett in 1971.1 A long-time communist, Gillett was well versed in socialist critiques of the ‘bourgeois’ nuclear family. She had also recently read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970). The book’s exposé of children’s oppression left a lasting impression and led her to query the movement’s ‘evolving ideas on the care of children, especially in their earlier years’. As well as campaigning for child care in order to ‘free women to enter the work force’, she now believed that ‘we should also continue to struggle for improved forms of care which objectively try to recognise the needs and rights of our children’.2 Like Gillett, many women’s liberationists were quick to make links between children’s liberation and their demands for child care. In their public campaigns for increased funding for child-care services, activists asserted both the benefits of accessible child care for women and its importance for children’s social development. At the same time, they sought to challenge the nuclear family model by experimenting with new approaches to child care in their local communities and their own families. Behind these efforts was a deeply utopian impulse: making child care a

collective responsibility was, women’s liberationists argued, the first step towards building more egalitarian relationships between adults and children. It was a philosophy that was perhaps best conveyed by the slogan, ‘Free mum, free dad, free me, free child care’, coined in the early years of the movement. Scholars have long identified child care as one of the preeminent concerns of second-wave feminism. As historian Michelle Arrow observes, child care was ‘an immediate priority for the women’s movement because it was a stumbling block to women’s full participation in public life’.3 Some have also hinted at the connections between children’s liberation and feminist child-care activism. Over two decades ago, Australian social policy researcher Deborah Brennan identified the concept of children’s liberation as ‘embedded’ in the vision of feminist community child-care groups in the 1970s.4 Similarly, a number of North American and British historians have touched on feminist efforts to create more ‘liberated’ forms of child care, in several cases drawing on their own experience.5 So far, however, the diverse ways in which children’s liberation motivated women’s liberationists’ activism in this arena, and especially attempts to provide child care within the feminist community itself, have not been systematically documented. This chapter addresses this lacuna, highlighting the centrality of children’s liberation, alongside arguments around gender equality, to feminist approaches to child care in the 1970s. In doing so, it also offers a wider reassessment of the contribution of women’s liberation to child-care activism. While few would deny the political significance attached to child care, women’s liberation has often been depicted as slow to take any practical action. Previous histories have tended to foreground the activities of femocrats in this area, alongside Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) and women in unions, compounding this impression.6 The combined effect has been to reinforce a perception of inertia on the part of women’s liberation relative to other parts of the feminist movement. Criticisms of women’s liberation’s failure to address child care in a substantive way are not without some basis. At the time, some members worried that child care was neglected and left largely to other groups. For example, historian Ann Curthoys, who joined Sydney Women’s Liberation

in 1970 and later moved to Canberra, expressed concern in 1975 that child care was ‘low on the movement’s list of priorities’ and mostly ‘confined’ to WEL.7 At stake here were broader questions about the status of mothers within women’s liberation. Curthoys—whose son was born in 1974—noted that one reason for the impasse was the fact that most activists did not have children and ‘for these women, and for myself until recently, child care seems to be not their problem’.8 Even so, the evidence presented in this chapter suggests that women’s liberation was more active than has typically been credited in pursuing the goal of collective child care, not least of all due to the concerns raised by mothers such as Curthoys. It is also worth noting that the demand for child care as a means to liberate women and children from the nuclear family was itself increasingly critiqued in this period, and more so after it, as predicated on a white, middle-class experience of motherhood and work. Child care emerged as a concern for both Indigenous and migrant women during this period, but not necessarily for the same reasons as those traced here. Activists at Murawina, the Aboriginal-run child-care service and preschool based in Redfern, Sydney, emphasised child care’s role in preserving cultural identity and strengthening mothers’ connections to their children, rather than as a mechanism for addressing the oppression of the nuclear family.9 Meanwhile, early accounts by migrant women in the feminist press, as well as a number of research studies, pointed to the sheer practical need for child care, especially for those undertaking shift-work in factories and, by the second half of the 1970s, there was a growing push for funding of migrantrun child-care services to address the specific needs of culturally-diverse communities.10 While women’s liberationists were cognisant and welcoming of these wider developments in the child-care arena, their own campaigns and child-care practices—emanating from a preoccupation with the effects of domesticity and suburban isolation on mothers and their children—could be viewed as catering primarily to the concerns of white, Anglo women. There is no doubt that child care was a fraught arena for feminist politics and arguably for women’s liberation in particular. Yet the underlying vision of collective child care was one that also proved to be highly appealing for many activists and, while they were not always

consistent in their efforts to implement it, the concept remained a feature of women’s liberation through the 1970s. Furthermore, women’s liberation brought a distinctive perspective to this work through its emphasis on the potential for child care to revolutionise relationships between adults and children more generally. This chapter begins by revisiting the critiques of children’s oppression in the nuclear family from which this vision emerged, before looking more closely at the practical child-care solutions activists devised and the difficulties they encountered in implementing them.

Children’s Oppression and the Nuclear Family In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nuclear family was attacked by a long list of radicals. Women’s liberationists were among those who ‘spearheaded’ the critique, but they were also joined and influenced by counterculturalists, gay rights activists, child liberationists, libertarian socialists, sexual liberationists, humanistic psychologists and radical therapists.11 As Australian political scientist Ashley Lavelle notes, a key component of the radical critique that emerged from these amorphous movements revolved around children. Within the nuclear family, it was argued, children were both overly protected by their parents and, at the same time, unduly subordinated to parental authority and treated as property.12 Feminist analyses of children’s oppression within the nuclear family followed along similar lines, but were distinguished by their focus on the connections between women’s and children’s oppression. Considered by many to be the book that launched second-wave feminism in the United States, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) laid the groundwork for the critiques that would later be developed by women’s liberation. Friedan famously described what she called the ‘problem that has no name’ or the ‘housewife syndrome’: a crisis of identity on the part of women that stemmed, she argued, from their own interests being sacrificed to the needs of the family.13 She did not stop here, however. In an important but often overlooked extension of this argument, Friedan asserted that children suffered from a similar crisis of self. The intensity of modern mothering had created an unhealthy ‘symbiosis’ between mother and child that prevented the latter from developing ‘separate selves’, she wrote.14 As a result, there was ‘a new and frightening

passivity, softness, boredom in American children’, manifesting in symptoms ranging from evidence of physical and muscular deterioration to college dropout rates.15 For Friedan, the domestic ideology of motherhood was not just detrimental to women, but children too. The Feminine Mystique was still widely read by Australian activists in the early 1970s, especially by mothers. When Canberra Women’s Liberation embarked on a reading program of feminist texts in December 1970, for example, they began with Friedan’s book, before tackling Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) the following month.16 Two years later, in 1972, the Eastern Suburbs Bread and Roses group in Sydney, which described itself as ‘more relevant’ for women with children, noted that their meetings focused on ‘issues directly related to our everyday lives’ and that they had discussed Friedan’s book ‘in this way’.17 While Friedan argued that women needed to look beyond their roles as mothers and wives if they were to lead fulfilling lives, she was less critical of the nuclear family itself. Her solution to the problem—that women seek paid work or other fulfilling occupations outside the home—did not require any fundamental change to this social structure. By contrast, much of the earliest literature that emerged out of the North American and British women’s liberation movements, including Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, emphasised the patriarchal nature of the nuclear family itself. This critical approach, when redeployed in local analyses, brought a sharper edge to Australian activists’ discussions of children’s oppression in this setting. Much like Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, these early women’s liberation writings focused on the intensity of the mother–child relationship in the context of the suburban family home. One of the first critiques, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (1966), by British socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell, characterised ‘exclusive maternity’ as ‘manifestly harmful to children’, leading the mother to release ‘her own frustrations and anxieties in a fixation on the child’.18 Germaine Greer went a step further in The Female Eunuch (1970), depicting her own mother as a violent and controlling figure, who would ‘tyrannize’ her children in the absence of other forms of power.19 Greer’s portrayal of her mother was controversial at the time and has proven to be the source of ongoing debate, with her

biographer, Christine Wallace, questioning its veracity.20 Even so, her recourse to personal testimony gave weight to her depiction of the nuclear family as a source of deep personal suffering and lent her account a greater degree of authority. These critiques of intense motherhood were offered, in part, as a response to the existing social science literature on ‘maternal deprivation’, spurred by the work of British psychiatrist John Bowlby. Having already begun to investigate the impact of maternal absence in the early 1940s, Bowlby gained international influence after the publication of his report, Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), for the World Health Organisation. The report, based on studies of children in institutions, hospitals and foster homes, found that children’s early separation from their mothers had a wide range of detrimental consequences, from mental health problems to delinquency.21 The young child’s ‘absolute need’ for ‘continuous care’ by his or her mother until the age of three was a central finding.22 By the late 1960s, Bowlby’s work had become a standard reference point for those who argued that women’s increasing workforce participation could have damaging effects on young children.23 In response, women’s liberationists were quick to single out his theories for critique. British socialist feminist Lee Comer described Bowlby as no less than the ‘arch perpetrator’ of the ‘myth’ that children require ‘constant and exclusive’ care from their mother.24 Her essay ‘The Motherhood Myth’ (1971) offered an especially systematic analysis of his and other studies on maternal deprivation. Comer pointed out flaws in their research methodology, particularly the extrapolation of findings relating to children raised in institutional settings to other contexts. Furthermore, she produced counter examples from studies that showed maternal absence had no impact on children’s social adjustment for children placed in day nurseries. The essay was welcomed by Australian women’s liberationists and reproduced in several forms, including in the Australian Left Review in 1972 and in a key anthology of Australian writings, The Other Half: Women in Australian Society (1975).25 Reflecting on its popularity, Melbourne women’s liberationist Kathie Gleeson noted that it ‘seemed to us at the time to be one of the first pieces of feminism which gave us facts to argue with’.26

Where these arguments focused on the problems of the mother–child relationship, other arguments linked children’s oppression in the nuclear family to the corresponding absence of male caregivers. As well as evidence of the unequal division of domestic labour, feminist texts portrayed men’s lack of participation in child care as a denial to children of an emotional connection with their fathers. A small body of literature on ‘men’s liberation’ that emerged in the early to mid-1970s further interrogated men’s distant and even hostile attitudes to their children.27 For example, an early North American collection of writings, Unbecoming Men: A Men’s Consciousness-raising Group Writes on Oppression and Themselves (1971)—identified by Melbourne activist Zelda D’Aprano as ‘widely distributed’ in the early years of women’s liberation—included one man’s account of having to overcome the negative attitudes that he had taken on from his father ‘and all the other old, rigid, authoritarian bastards that fucked me up’ as he learned to be a ‘father’ to the children of his lover.28 In addition, some members of gay liberation declared their commitment to ‘effeminism’ and linked the process of becoming ‘unmanly’ to participation in child care.29 They took inspiration from ‘The Effeminist Manifesto’ (1973), published by New York activists Steven Dansky, John Knoebel and Kenneth Pitchford. The manifesto identified participation in ‘the day-to-day life-sustaining drudgery’ of child care as the ‘first and most important step’ towards redefining gender for themselves and ‘the next generation’. Child care was, in their view, ‘a duty, a right, and a privilege’.30 That the problems caused by exclusive maternity—and concomitantly, male absence from childrearing—were a significant focus of these early writings is not surprising, given women’s liberationists’ wider questioning of women’s maternal role. But this was not the only point of comparison noted in these early texts. An equally important line of argument, inspired by earlier socialist writings, focused on women’s and children’s status as ‘property’ in the nuclear family, or what Firestone referred to as the problem of ‘patronage’.31 Friedrich Engels’ analysis of the historical evolution of the family in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) was especially influential. Its account of the nuclear family (and associated features, including monogamous marriage) as a modern

phenomenon could be used to challenge assertions that it represented the ‘natural’ unit of society and to expose the materialist basis of its hierarchical structure.32 A typical explanation appeared in a paper on the subject delivered at the Sydney Women’s Liberation Conference at the beginning of 1971. ‘The nuclear family is a more or less artificially demarcated sub-group of relatives seen traditionally as the appropriate members of a kind of housing and economic cooperative’, the author explained, before proceeding methodically to lay out the hierarchy of property relations within it: father = ‘breadwinner’/‘head of household’/property owner, etc. mother = bearer and rearer of the children of that man – the property of that man … child = a kind of property of these monogamous marriage partners/things in their image having no choice of where they live and whose respect and liking are assumed in return for being looked after.33 As was hinted at here, what women’s liberationists found especially disturbing was the transactional nature of the parent–child relationship; children’s property status bound them to their parents irrespective of whether any genuine feelings of love existed. This situation epitomised the problem of exclusivity that feminists—in keeping with the counterculture’s calls for ‘free love’—argued characterised the nuclear family more generally. Indeed, in her widely read tract, ‘Functions of the Family’ (1969), North American socialist feminist Linda Gordon went so far as to describe the property status of children as paradigmatic of the wider commodification of love. ‘[T]he fact that we often confuse the issue of parental love with parental proprietorship merely reminds us of how much love itself has become a commodity in our capitalist society’, she wrote.34 It was a challenging argument and provoked strong reactions, not least of all from mothers in the movement as they reflected on their relationships with their own children. So too did the various solutions proposed. Some

feminists called for the ‘abolition of the nuclear family’, but others were less sure whether this was a desirable—or at least, necessary—goal. The manifesto adopted by Adelaide Women’s Liberation in 1970, for example, called for the ‘abolition of the family as an institution’, but added that ‘There is no reason why people may not freely choose to live in a familial situation’.35 Certainly, not all feminist mothers were themselves willing to abandon the nuclear family unit, making it imperative that other options be formulated. There was, nonetheless, one point on which there was general consensus: a more communal approach to raising children was urgently needed. Accordingly, when it came to developing feminist models of child care, the principle of collective responsibility would be paramount.

The Feminist Child-Care Revolution? Australian women’s workforce participation increased dramatically in the 1960s, rising from 34 per cent in 1961 to 39.5 per cent in 1970.36 Yet many women still remained excluded from paid employment due to a lack of child care—indeed, a 1969 survey suggested over 100 000 women would return to work if they had access to child care.37 Women’s liberationists quickly recognised that child care would need to be one of their main priorities. In many cities, dedicated child-care action groups were set up to oversee campaigning on the issue. In addition, suburban groups worked to improve child-care facilities in their local areas. In Sydney, for example, it was reported as early as July 1970 that while the ‘major campaign’ of the movement was around abortion, a group had also been set up around child care.38 In subsequent years, a range of local groups organised actions around the issue, including the Glebe Group and Hurstville Group in 1971, Burwood Group in 1973 and Bankstown Group in 1974.39 In addition, in July 1972, a Child Care Action Group was set up to develop a more coordinated approach. Approximately twenty women ‘and as many children’ attended the first meeting of the group at Women’s Liberation House, at which they made plans to organise a public forum on the subject.40 The provision of child care at universities was also a major focus, reflecting the strong presence of women’s liberation on campuses, as well

as the changing demographic profile of the student population.41 In November 1972, for example, Perth activist Penny Ewin reported excitedly on the opening of a child-care centre at the University of Western Australia, noting that women’s liberation had assisted with ‘such practical chores as getting their grass mown’, as well as compiling relevant research, including responding to claims of maternal deprivation.42 Others encountered greater resistance to their demands. For example, a campaign for a universityfunded child-care facility at the University of Melbourne culminated in an occupation of the university council chambers on 6 May 1974. Approximately sixty women, men and children took part in the protest, which ended with twelve people being arrested.43 Importantly, feminists were not alone in identifying child care as a pressing issue. Already in 1970, the issue of child care had begun to receive increasing political attention. That year, Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton put forward what was subsequently dubbed the ‘Gortongarten plan’—a proposal for a network of child-care centres for working mothers.44 The plan did not go ahead, but two years later, his successor, William McMahon, promised to provide Commonwealth Government funding of $5 million for child care and passed the Child Care Act 1972, allowing it to allocate capital and recurrent grants to centre operators.45 These developments certainly contributed to the momentum around the issue of child care. It is important to note, however, that they were not primarily driven by feminist concerns but by employer groups and the existing childcare lobby. Accordingly, child care was couched as a means to improve women’s reliability and morale as workers, rather than as a social good.46 By contrast, women’s liberationists emphasised the transformative potential of child care for personal relationships and gender equality. They demanded no less than access to ‘twenty-four-hour child care’, on the basis that, if child care was to liberate women from their familial obligations, it would need to be available on demand and made accessible to all mothers, regardless of their personal or work circumstances. Moreover, for child care to achieve its true revolutionary potential, it would need to be made available to facilitate women’s participation in all aspects of political and social life, not just their employment. Therein lay an important distinction: as British historian and socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham notes, ‘Seeing

child care as a means of developing new forms of relationship and of democratizing control over everyday life differed from arguing for nursery provision in terms of women’s right to work.’47 Connecting child care to children’s liberation represented a logical extension of this argument. At the first national women’s liberation conference, held in Melbourne in May 1970, child care was declared to be necessary not only to end the sexual division of labour but also to challenge ‘the unquestioned authority of parents over their biological children’.48 Subsequent political campaigns similarly alluded to the revolutionary possibilities of child care. Later that year, for example, Sydney women’s liberation issued postcards addressed to the federal government featuring a photo of a child with the caption ‘Free mum, free dad, free me, free child care’.49 The slogan would reappear in campaigns across the decade—for example, it was issued as a poster several years later (see Figure 3) and featured on a banner hung from a dedicated children’s float adorned with balloons at the International Women’s Day rally in Sydney in March 1975 (see Figure 4). The presence of children in such instances also served to foreground their needs, and proved effective for gaining sympathetic media coverage.

Figure 3: Posters for women’s liberation events in Sydney, 1974. Tribune collection, ON 162/Item 34, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation. While much of the focus was on increasing access to child-care services, calls for children’s liberation also prompted feminists to scrutinise the conditions within existing child-care centres. Mothers in the movement shared disturbing insider accounts of the services their children had attended. In the inaugural edition of Mejane, publishedin March 1971, Sydney activist and mother Lesley Gray (later Lynch) recounted her experiences of using child care over the previous three-and-a-half years. Her first experience, when her young son was two months old, was particularly bleak. While the child-care workers were ‘competent and kindly’, she felt that the centre was far from an ‘ideal environment’. She worried that there were insufficient staff, a lack of toys and, critically, ‘too much discipline and regimentation’. The ‘most devastating manifestation’ of the centre’s punitive approach to childrearing was the toilet-training

regime. Each day that Gray arrived at the nursery, she found ‘rows of babies on their potties where they stayed till they produced their shit’, a ‘character building exercise’ that her son was ‘spared’, as they left the centre before he could stand up. He had since been looked after by nannies and two different child-care centres, most recently at the newly opened Sydney University Child Care Centre. She had ‘no complaints’ about the new centre but also acknowledged that it was only because they were ‘middle class people with university connections’ that they were able to secure a place there.50

Figure 4: International Women’s Day rally, Sydney, March 1975. Tribune collection, ON 160/Item 0048, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation. Gray and other mothers’ concerns about conditions within existing centres complicated the feminist demand for child care, making it difficult to advocate the extension of the current system. The dilemma was summed up by Adelaide women’s liberationist Julie Ellis in Liberation in October

1971. Taking the lead from the article ‘On Day Care’, by United States activists Louise Gross and Phyllis MacEwan in the influential anthology Voices from Women’s Liberation (1970), Ellis described child care as a ‘children’s liberation’ and ‘people’s liberation issue’ and noted fundamental problems in existing centres. ‘Most are run for profit, based on routine, obedience, passivity—dumping ground babysitting services run by women exclusively’, she declared. For Ellis, calls for the expansion of child-care services in this context were highly problematic. She implored Australian activists to ‘learn from the experience of women in the US where child care is becoming a giant industry, before we frame our demands’.51 The question of who was to provide child-care services was indeed a critical one. The article by Gross and MacEwan located the problem for women’s liberation in an underlying conflict between ‘our goals for children’ and ‘those institutions—corporations and universities—from which we will be demanding day care services’.52 However, for Australian women’s liberationists, it was the role of the state in the provision of child care as much as the private sector that worried activists. The dilemma was a classic one for women’s liberation: the demand for free child care was directed first and foremost at the state, yet, reflecting its origins in the new left, women’s liberation was also highly sceptical of the state and its authoritarian tendencies.53 Accordingly, at the Women’s Liberation Conference in Sydney in 1971, activists debated whether ‘state solutions’ were in fact preferable to the nuclear family and, in particular, noted concerns over the ‘effect of extending the present rotten authoritarian education system even further back into a child’s life’.54 One participant later reflected that the deliberations revealed a need to examine child-care centres ‘more thoroughly and more critically and try to relate them to a coherent vision of the future’.55 A central thread through these discussions was the question of adult power in the child-care setting. Were child-care centres just another form of social control? Kathie Gordon certainly thought so after reading radical education theorist Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society (1971). Reviewing the book in Mejane in 1973, she queried whether child care simply reinforced adults’ control over children. Gordon asked:

Don’t we condemn the child—without its consent—to be confined where it may not want to be? No matter what the content of the child care programme, what is the lesson involved in mere attendance? When a child is directed through getting up, dressing, eating, getting to school, then coming home again mainly on the parents’ schedule, certainly one lesson is that the child’s life is someone elses [sic] to direct. When confined with only other small children and adults in charge, isn’t the lesson that children aren’t exactly people?56 Such were her reservations that Gordon had begun to consider other options, including a ‘reinterpretation and expansion’ of the concept of child endowment, a core demand of earlier generations of feminists as part of their claim for the ‘citizen mother’.57 However, this solution sat uneasily with calls for child care to be made a collective responsibility and, as Gordon noted, would have been considered a ‘blasphemy’ by most women’s liberationists.58 Instead, child-care activists proposed another solution: a new model of ‘community-controlled child care’, run by parents, staff and other members of the local community.59 As Deborah Brennan has previously shown, this principle was to become a hallmark of Australian feminist activism around child care in the 1970s. Asserting the value of local knowledge and of parents’ right to be involved in decision-making within child-care settings, proponents of ‘community control’ described the approach as an essential counter to the kinds of regimented care that women’s liberationists associated with existing services.60 Notably, the concept of ‘community control’ was also one that had wider applications, as reflected in the establishment of Indigenous and migrant-run child-care services in this period: for example, Murawina was established in Redfern in 1973,61 while the Office of Child Care provided direct funding to several ethnic community groups in 1976 to set up day-care centres.62 The concept of ‘community control’ did not necessarily have the same associations across these settings, however—for example, whereas parental involvement was a strong feature of the feminist model, some migrant activists were critical of

this principle as favouring ‘confident, articulate, middle-class, white anglosaxons’.63 The need for community-controlled child care featured in a range of early women’s liberation’s campaigns, but came to be most closely associated with the influential Melbourne group, Community Controlled Child Care (CCC). Established in 1971, CCC was partly inspired by the initiatives of North American activists. One of the founding members of CCC was Winsome McCaughey, who had previously been part of a childcare cooperative in New York.64 The group emerged directly out of women’s liberation and continued to maintain its links to the movement, but also developed connections to WEL, which McCaughey joined in 1972, taking on the child-care portfolio. It ran a Resource and Advisory Centre from 1973 to 1980, producing a range of resources for local groups wanting to set up child-care centres.65 The group’s key principles were set out in a short booklet produced in 1972 and circulated nationally. Child care should, it argued, be free and available to all parents of children under school age, ‘regardless of their reasons for use, or their socio-economic status’. In setting standards for care, the focus should be on children’s needs and interests: ‘the aim of all child care facilities should be to provide the best possible environment and program for a child’s full emotional, social and cognitive development’. Finally, child-care centres should be community run, with parents and staff working together cooperatively. The ideal centre was one in which ‘people of every age, social and ethnic group come to develop an understanding and concern for one another, and can gain friendship and a sense of belonging in their neighbourhood’.66 This vision was put into practice at centres supported by CCC, such as the Kensington Women’s Group Child Care Co-operative, which opened in April 1977 after over a year of planning. Located in an old inner suburb of Melbourne with a high proportion of low-income families, an early funding submission described the group’s aim as being to create a space for women ‘of all backgrounds’—including migrant women, single mothers and older women—to meet ‘in a relaxed atmosphere where they can bring their children’.67 Such a centre would provide ‘a realistic start in dealing with the difficulties of nuclear families, living in small confined areas which

completely ignore the needs of young children and the development of women intellectually’.68 Local initiatives such as the Kensington cooperative were assisted by feminists’ growing influence over child-care policy at a federal level. The Whitlam government’s early policies on child-care funding prioritised preschools, but by 1973 internal pressure saw the Labor Party commit to supporting comprehensive child-care services.69 On the advice of his women’s advisor, Elizabeth Reid (a former member of Canberra Women’s Liberation), Whitlam promised to establish a national child-care program, at an estimated cost of $130 million a year, during the May 1974 federal election.70 When the Labor government subsequently announced the funding would need to be deferred, women’s groups were successful in lobbying for $75 million to be retained and, in September 1974, the government announced its plan to establish an independent Children’s Commission to oversee the funding of a wide range of children’s services. This plan was, however, cut short by the dismissal of the Whitlam government in November 1975. The Fraser government did not proceed with the proposal, instead moving responsibility for child care to the Department of Social Security—but nor did it withdraw Commonwealth support for child care, as some feared given its mantra of reducing ‘irresponsible’ government spending.71 Despite these early—if only partial—political gains, progress in establishing feminist-based child-care services was slow overall. Crucially, the funding model introduced by the Whitlam government aimed to promote local services, an approach that seemingly fitted with the community-controlled child-care model. However, in practice the submission process—which required that organisations be legally incorporated, non-profit bodies or have formal support from the local council—favoured well-established providers and, in the absence of similar bodies to CCC in other states until later, feminist-based child-care services were established on a haphazard basis.72 For example, it was not until 1978 that an equivalent organisation, the Community Child Care Co-operative NSW, was formed in Sydney.73 While increased government funding for formal child-care services remained a key demand, it was not the only goal of women’s liberationists

—especially in view of some activists’ scepticism about ‘state solutions’. As discussed in Chapter 1, women’s liberationists established their own child-care centres and spaces, which were integrated into their activist projects in recognition of the centrality of child care to many women’s lives. Mothers also made their own arrangements for shared child care, drawing on the movement itself as a resource. In a quintessential form of feminist ‘self-help’, individual mothers advertised in feminist newsletters for other women interested in reciprocal childminding arrangements.74 Others organised child care through their consciousness-raising or support groups. In Sydney, the interest in reciprocal childminding within the Lesbian Mothers Group even justified the establishment of a dedicated subgroup in 1980, two years after its formation in 1978.75 Above all, women explored new ways of applying the collective child-care ideal in their own families. Attention to the personal politics of child care is crucial to fully capture women’s liberation’s distinctive contribution in this arena.

The Personal Politics of Child Care In 1977, feminist sociologist Betsy Wearing embarked on a research project on the ‘ideology of motherhood’ as part of her doctoral studies.76 Over the next two years, she went on to interview 150 suburban mothers in Sydney, including a sample of twenty-five women drawn from WEL, women’s studies courses, consciousness-raising groups and women’s services. Many of the feminist mothers interviewed had attempted to find new ways of relating to their children. Yet none had reached the stage of what Wearing described as ‘radical utopian’ motherhood: they had not succeeded in sharing the ‘primary responsibility for the care … with another person or people’.77 According to Wearing, a typical case was that of Felicity Martin, who shared a house in Glebe with another single mother. While the two women and a single father who lived nearby had devised a system for sharing evening child care, the arrangement was a limited one. Ultimately, Martin wished she would be in a position to take longer breaks from her four-year-old son, ‘without guilt, and knowing that he is loved’.78 As Wearing’s finding suggests, full realisation of the ideal of collective child care eluded most feminist mothers when it came to raising their own children. Nonetheless, many activists took steps to implement this principle

in their families in at least some way. This was reflected in two paradigmatic developments that were invariably justified not only in terms of women’s liberation but that of their children: those who continued to live in heterosexual nuclear family situations emphasised the importance of shared parenting and role reversals within it; a smaller number sought to transcend the nuclear family itself through various forms of communal living. Perth mother Madelon Wilkens was one of those who took the first of these options. In a lively exchange prompted by a discussion over the politics of childlessness, she reassured readers of the local women’s liberation journal Sibyl that ‘it is not necessary to accept the traditional martyrdom associated with motherhood’. She and her male partner had negotiated an arrangement that allowed both of them to pursue interests outside the family home: she was undertaking further study, while he worked. Crucially, the arrangement was one that also had benefits for their child, who enjoyed ‘a warm and intense relationship’ with both of them, she emphasised.79 Other women’s liberationists likewise emphasised the importance of their male partners’ participation in child care—not only because they considered shared parenting to be a precondition for greater equality within heterosexual relationships, but also because such arrangements would, they argued, better serve the interests of children. Their hopes were vividly captured in children’s book illustrator Rae Dale’s poster, Parents (1975), distributed by the Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative (WMCLC) to kindergartens throughout Victoria during International Women’s Year. Featuring twelve scenes of domestic life, including a man changing a dirty nappy, bottle-feeding a baby and preparing a roast dinner, the poster placed fathers at the centre of the feminist household and, crucially, as role models for their children. Although there was broad agreement that fathers’ involvement was important not only for women but children too, putting this principle into practice was another question. Certainly, some mothers enjoyed considerable support. Ann Curthoys, for example, described herself as having shared the care of her son with her husband ‘equally, rigidly equally’.80 Wearing’s study also provides evidence of at least some women

negotiating successfully with their male partners. At the very least, they seemed to be better off than their non-feminist peers: all fifteen feminist mothers living with a male partner indicated that the men spent time playing, reading, dressing or minding children, compared with a small minority of non-feminist mothers (only 8 per cent of those categorised by Wearing as working-class mothers and 20 per cent of those categorised as middle-class mothers).81 The emerging phenomenon of the ‘stay-at-home’ father was also documented by Melbourne sociologist Jan Harper—a founding member of the WMCLC—around this time in her study of fifteen couples who had embraced the concept. She described the trend as ‘revolutionary in the sense that a new pattern of intimate human relationships represents a vision of utopia’.82 Yet although shared parenting and role reversals were certainly held up as a feminist ideal, not all mothers succeeded in brokering such arrangements. Male resistance to assisting women in the home—powerfully satirised in North American Pat Mainardi’s widely reproduced article ‘The Politics of Housework’ (1970)—remained a source of frustration for many women, and child care was no different.83 One of the feminist mothers in Wearing’s study, Hannah Coral, admitted to being ‘envious’ of friends whose partners were more involved in the home and to having ‘fights’ about it with her husband.84 Sydney women’s liberationist Deirdre Ferguson described a significant gap between her ‘very idealistic notions about sharing bringing up children’ and the reality that, despite being a ‘lefty’, her husband ‘didn’t have those views, he’d do a little but up to a point’. They eventually separated.85 This was not an unfamiliar story, particularly following the introduction of no-fault divorce in 1975, although some women would have to navigate difficult custody disputes.86 It was not only in adversarial contexts that challenges arose. Even where men were willing to share in child care and other domestic work, external barriers, such as resistance from employers, could hamper efforts to establish more equitable arrangements. For example, one mother, Kerry Barlow, wrote to Womanspeak in 1979 explaining that plans for her husband to take over the care of their infant son had been impeded by his employer, who was ‘quite dismayed to hear that a man would want to stay at home with his child’ and refused to approve his leave.87 In her study,

Harper also noted that so far the phenomenon of role reversals favoured middle-class couples, who were less likely to have ‘a large discrepancy in incomes; by contrast, well-paying positions in business and trade occupations are heavily male dominated, and wives in these fields can rarely match their husbands’ earning capacity’.88 Other factors also meant that shared parenting and role reversals within the heterosexual family remained inadequate solutions for many women and their children. Crucially, such arrangements were only directly applicable to those in heterosexual relationships. Emphasising the need for men’s involvement was potentially risky for single and lesbian mothers, who were wary of reinforcing the idea that children—and especially sons— required a father figure. In a context where lesbian mothers faced significant obstacles when seeking legal custody of their children, feminists could not afford to focus solely on men as a solution to the child-care problem.89 Above all, shared parenting and role reversals within the nuclear family necessarily represented only a limited application of the principle of collective child care; moreover, they did little to alter children’s status as ‘property’ of their parents. Many women placed their hopes instead in the development of alternatives to the nuclear family, particularly in new forms of communal living. Influenced by the wider countercultural movement, communal living was advocated in some of the most influential feminist texts of the period as a way of liberating women and children from the nuclear family, including in Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Advocates of communal living made expansive claims about its benefits, including for children. Greer, for example, presented her ‘dream’ of setting up a household with her friends in a farmhouse in Southern Italy as motivated by the interests of her imagined child, who would no longer have to ‘suffer from my neuroses’ or ‘grow up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a city flat’.90 In her new model of the ‘organic family’—or chosen family —children would no longer be treated as property and instead become autonomous subjects: The point of the organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being the extensions of their parents so that they

can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies. There could be scope for them to initiate their own activities and define the mode and extent of their own learning.91 In a similar vein, Canberra activist Biff Ward argued in Mejane in 1972 that she saw significant benefits for children in communal arrangements. Describing plans for a commune she hoped to establish with fellow women’s liberationist Julia Ryan—who had recently returned from Israel, where she and her children had spent time on a kibbutz92—Ward argued that children would be able to establish independent relationships with their peers and a wider range of adults. Placed together from birth, children would learn ‘to co-operate and to enjoy one another’s company in a very valuable way’, she asserted, and would gain ‘tremendous advantages … out of loving a lot of adults and being able to learn the best and worst from a lot of people’.93 Yet women’s liberationists also had significant reservations about communal living experiments, with reports that women still found themselves burdened with the majority of the domestic labour. In the same issue of Mejane, the editorialcollective noted its disillusionment at finding out ‘how oppressive the hippie commune was for the women’ after reading an exposé in the North American journal Women: A Journal of Women’s Liberation.94 The group’s concern was echoed in Beryl Donaldson’s later essay on the counterculture in the anthology, The Other Half: Women in Australian Society (1975). Donaldson warned that ‘a belief in the “autonomy” of children’ only reinforced the status quo, ‘creating a situation where there are no norms requiring paternal responsibility’.95 Ironically, the notion of children’s liberation could be used by men to evade demands that they contribute to child care. Even so, communal living was still considered by many to be a necessary step to challenge the biological ties of the nuclear family, and provided the context in which the concept of collective child care would be most comprehensively tested. The earliest of these experiments typically took the form of mixed-sex households. A prime example was the commune set up by Sydney feminists and long-time communists Joyce

Stevens and Mavis Robertson in early 1972. The two women had been early recruits to women’s liberation and their involvement had precipitated significant changes in their own lives, especially for Stevens, who had recently separated from her husband. Located in Roseville, a suburb on Sydney’s affluent north shore, the eight-person household was profiled in the Sydney Morning Herald in July that year. Stevens and Robertson outlined a range of measures that had been introduced to build a sense of collective obligation, including the adoption of a roster system to ensure equal participation in domestic chores, along with a strict policy of income pooling and household budgeting. These measures were also presented as a means of breaking down family groupings within the commune. After six months of living together, Stevens and Robertson claimed to have had some success already, asserting that the lines between individual families and the ‘communal family’ had become increasingly ‘blurred’. Robertson’s teenage son, Peter, similarly reported that the commune had brought ‘a huge amount of freedom’ in contrast to the ‘very tight relationship before’. Consequently, he no longer took his parents ‘for granted’, explaining that he had ‘come to know them a lot better, to see them against other people’.96 For advocates of communal living, here was prime evidence of the new possibilities for personal relationships that it might open up. Stevens and Robertson quickly became enthusiastic proponents of the commune model. As well as agreeing to the profile piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, they promoted the possibilities of communal living to other women’s liberationists, giving talks on the subject and hosting visits by other activists, including Ward and Ryan who were in the process of seeking out premises for their proposed commune in Canberra at the time.97 Yet despite the professed aims of the commune—and the image presented in the Herald article—most of the work of running the household continued to hinge on the two women. Indeed, Ryan later recalled that it struck her that Stevens and Robertson now had ‘the burden, a much greater burden of responsibility, of this conglomerate’ rather than a single household.98 The reservations expressed by others about communal living seemed to be confirmed in this case and, not long after, the household disbanded. The Roseville commune represented an especially methodical experiment in communal living. At the other end of the spectrum—and

perhaps more typical of this mode of living—were the more anarchic households portrayed in Melbourne-based feminist author Helen Garner’s much celebrated first novel, Monkey Grip (1977). Loosely based on Garner’s own experiences, the book follows the central character, Nora, as she moves back and forth between her own and various male lovers’ innercity communal households where there is little formal structure. Here, the ethos of children’s liberation finds expression in the loose child-care arrangements Nora makes for her daughter, Grace, who is looked after by a range of adults. Signalling the diffusion of parenting roles among the household members and a shift towards more egalitarian adult–child relationships, Grace calls all the adults, including her mother, by their first names.99 Reviewing Monkey Grip in Vashti’s Voice in 1978, fellow Melbourne activist Sue King heralded it as ‘a book about adults where a child is a character, not a stage prop or a pawn in the game’.100 King herself was a single mother and had two years earlier moved into a share house with another woman and her children.101 Her experience was indicative of a growing preference more generally in the mid- to late 1970s for women-only households. The disillusionment of some activists at the continued uneven division of labour in mixed-sex communes was part of the reason for this trend. For some mothers, especially single mothers, it was also the only practical option. Despite the introduction of the supporting mother’s benefit in 1973, women often struggled financially; Wearing observed that they were just as likely to join communal households ‘out of sheer necessity’ as for ideological reasons.102 The frequency with which advertisements appeared for such arrangements in the Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter is telling: twelve notices for mothers seeking to share accommodation were published between August 1973 and April 1974, just after the supporting mother’s benefit became available.103 Furthermore, this shift reflected the growing influence of radical feminism and a more vocal lesbian feminist presence in the movement. In this context, women-only households came to be conceptualised as an expression of a ‘woman-identified’ lifestyle, and shared responsibility for children was interpreted as a means of overcoming divisions among women themselves.104

These principles came together with the establishment of a number of rural women’s communes or ‘women’s lands’. The best-known of these ventures was Amazon Acres, established in Wauchope, 400 kilometres north of Sydney, in 1974. Made possible by the financial contributions of women in Sydney and Melbourne, its founders’ objective was to create a self-sustaining community where ‘women could work towards gaining control of their lives’.105 Children were among the first visitors. A report in the collective’s first newsletter noted a visit from two Sydney women and their four children, including at least one boy.106 Reducing biological ties between mothers and children was strongly emphasised. Members declared their ambition to ‘make the bind between a mother and her own child/children less demanding’.107 Children would continue to be part of the Amazon Acres community over the years, although boys’ presence would become contentious. A member of the group told Sydney activists in March 1974 that the group was ‘not adamant yet’ about men’s presence and that ‘[s]mall boys under [a] certain age [were] allowed to come’ (exactly what age was not specified).108 However, some women would become less tolerant of boys’ presence later, ultimately leading to a split among residents in the early 1980s.109 This was not the only tension that emerged in women-only communes. As with mixed-sex communes, the ideal of collective child care proved to be difficult to accomplish, despite the hopes that it would lead to a stronger women’s culture. At the Sorrento Conference, organised by the Melbourne Radicalesbians in 1973, attendees had discussed compiling a list of names of women willing to ‘share the responsibility for our sisters’ children’.110 Three years on, King observed that while there was a sizable group of women who babysat children of friends and ‘most of the time see it as part of their politics that they should do so’, there were only a ‘very small number of childless women [who] voluntarily choose, not only to live with children, but to share the work’. Typically, they did so because they were in a relationship with the mother, ‘and there is nothing particularly new or revolutionary about that’, she suggested.111 Even more troubling were complaints of mothers and their children being deliberately excluded from feminist households. Writing in a 1980 special issue of Refractory Girl on feminists and children, one especially

vocal critic and mother of two, Meredith Quinn, described being turned away from feminist households in Sydney in the late 1970s. A cartoon accompanying the article showed a woman holding a crying baby and with a second child beside her on the front step of a house; ‘Feminist household. No kids wanted!’, a sign on the front door read. Echoing King, Quinn was also critical of childless women for being unwilling to take on more than a temporary commitment to children. Childless feminists were often prepared to be involved with children for a short period but then ‘disappear, rarely to be seen again’, she alleged, a situation that only further reinforced their ‘dependency’ on their mothers as the ‘only consistent presence in their lives’.112 Importantly, this was a sensitive point for feminist mothers and those who did not have children alike. Where Quinn highlighted the difficulties that arose for mothers from other women’s tendency to ‘disappear’, childless women emphasised the emotional complications associated with looking after other feminists’ children, especially in the case of forced separations. The fragility of such arrangements was underlined in a later collection of short stories by Garner, Honour and Other People’s Children (1980), featuring the woman-only household of Ruth, her children, Laurel and Wally, and friend Scotty, and once again based on Garner’s experience. Reflecting back on the early years of the household, Scotty notes that the shared care of children helped to draw the women closer: ‘The kids were everyone’s kids’ and the daughters of two women even referred to each other as sisters, she explains.113 Several years on, the women’s friendship had deteriorated and the story culminates in Ruth’s decision to leave the household, taking her children with her and leaving Scotty feeling despondent. Rather than undermining biological ties and children’s status as ‘property’, as many feminists hoped, the experience of caring for other women’s children could have the opposite effect. Communal living, held up by many within women’s liberation as the ultimate means of liberating both mothers and children from the constraints of the nuclear family, proved to generate significant discord within the movement. Yet it is worth noting that even critics such as Quinn were primarily concerned with the way it was practised, rather than the concept itself. Indeed, Quinn was just as adamant as others that communal living

was the best way forward and invested significant hope in its capacity to ‘challenge the supremacy of blood relations’ and ‘revolutionise family relationships’.114 While by no means universally embraced within the movement, communal living was widely seen as holding transformative potential and many remained convinced that, under the right conditions, its full benefits would be realised. As the protracted debates around communal living demonstrate, child care was not simply a practical issue for women’s liberation. Rather, activists saw it as a key means through which the relationships between women, men and children might be redefined along more egalitarian terms. Central to this vision was a belief that collective responsibility for children would promote greater attention to their rights and interests—an ambition that in turn imposed new obligations on the feminist community and placed significant demands on activists’ personal lives. The debates that accompanied these initiatives likewise underline the high hopes that were invested in this vision of collective child care as part of the shared project of women’s and children’s liberation—and the deeply utopian impulses that drove activists to pursue this goal. Ultimately, this emphasis on collective child care was itself only one component of a wider intervention into the process of child-rearing prompted by a concern with children’s liberation. As the next chapter will show, it was not only the question of who raised children but how they were raised that was understood to be crucial for the advancement of this agenda, particularly if women wished to achieve more egalitarian relationships with their own children. In turn, the imperative of raising ‘free’ children would also be one that connected child care to feminist efforts to intervene in the wider process of childhood socialisation, as mothers, teachers and cultural activists began to scrutinise the effects of social conditioning from infancy onwards.

Chapter 3 Educate to Liberate

‘Are our schools sexist?’ The answer, according to Sylvia Innes, was a categorical ‘yes’. Innes had recently been appointed as the first women’s program coordinator for the Queensland Teachers’ Union. Writing in the organisation’s quarterly journal in March 1976, just months after a national inquiry had exposed major disparities in girls’ and boys’ educational outcomes, she was determined to make her colleagues aware of how sexism operated in their schools. Many of her readers would already have been aware of the inquiry’s findings. Whether or not they were ready to face their own complicity in perpetuating sexism was another question. ‘Do you line your classes up in segregated lines, and allow girls to go first?’, she queried. ‘Why?’1 Notwithstanding the accusative tone of her article, Innes’ intention was not simply to rebuke or harangue. Her message was, in fact, a much more positive one. If teachers were capable of socialising girls and boys into socially prescribed ‘sex roles’, then the opposite should also apply: they could use their positions to promote more equal forms of relating. ‘Educate to Liberate’ was the title Innes had chosen for the new section of the teachers’ union journal in which her consciousness-raising missive appeared. Over the course of the next year, she planned to use this space to share information about ‘sex discrimination’ in the education system and to

outline strategies that teachers could implement in the classroom to counter it. A similar logic propelled the many ‘non-sexist’ projects that proliferated in the 1970s. Determined to raise a new generation unencumbered by the constraints of conventional sex roles, feminist mothers, cultural activists and teachers set out to challenge the conventional dynamics of children’s socialisation. Some experimented with new methods of ‘liberated’ parenting in their own families and sought to put these principles into practice at their child-care centres. Others worked towards wider structural change: they began producing feminist children’s books that would reach a broader audience, argued for curriculum reform in the state system and sought funding for alternative schools that offered ‘progressive’ learning environments. Innes and other activists’ preoccupation with challenging sex-role socialisation is not in itself surprising. Feminist critiques of the process of childhood ‘conditioning’ are a familiar motif in histories of the second wave, both in Australia and overseas.2 However, scholars have only recently begun to fully consider the breadth of activities inspired by these critiques—particularly those beyond the realm of education—and to identify such initiatives as a central focus of feminist activism.3 Furthermore, while quick to identify feminists’ commitment to challenging sex roles, historians have been less attentive to the ways in which their critiques of the socialisation process precipitated a broader questioning of children’s social status. Yet, as this chapter shows, it was through their early analyses of sexrole socialisation that many women’s liberationists first began to reassess the power exerted by adults over children, arguing that this unequal relationship was a precondition of early childhood conditioning. Moreover, feminists’ attempts to implement non-sexist alternatives presented their own dilemmas: were their interventions just another form of conditioning and, if so, would they simply end up replicating existing power relations? The problem was not one that could be easily resolved—all the more so given the sense of urgency with which women’s liberationists took up their task. This chapter traces the 1970s feminist impulse to counter sex roles at

home, in the media and in the classroom, and explores how activists negotiated the challenges that inevitably accompanied their interventions.

The Problem of Childhood Socialisation In the summer of 1975, Joyce Nicholson set out to write her ‘first feminist book’.4 The daughter of a successful Melbourne publisher, D.W. Thorpe, she was already a well-established children’s author and had, for several years, been running the family publishing business. After having become politicised through her membership of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), Nicholson welcomed the invitation to contribute to a new Pitman series entitled ‘Speaking Out’. The result was What Society Does to Girls (1975), a feminist primer aimed at school students, parents and teachers. Nicholson’s text provided a classic feminist account of sex-role socialisation or conditioning. Children were, she argued, sex-typed from birth, from the selection of baby clothes and toys to the kinds of physical affection offered to them. As a result of this differential treatment, children learned to behave according to their predetermined sex role. Girls were ‘taught’ to be ‘passive and quiet, sweet and kind and clean’ and boys to be ‘aggressive and creative, competitive, tough and masterful’.5 If in doubt, readers were urged to observe these patterns for themselves: You don’t believe me? Do an exercise in listening and studying. It is quite fascinating, once you start to notice, to find out how often exactly the same action from a little boy or a little girl will bring a completely different reaction from an adult … A little girl cries, or wheedles, or looks up lovingly at her father, and father goes to her rescue or gives her what she wants. A little boy cries, and is told: ‘Don’t be a sissy’ or ‘Little boys don’t cry’.6 As the title of her book implied, Nicholson considered girls to be the most socially disadvantaged by this process. Nonetheless, she emphasised that boys ‘suffered’ too, through being forced to maintain a ‘brave’ front.7 Well timed for release in International Women’s Year (IWY), What Society Does to Girls gained a strong following amongst Australian activists, including women’s liberationists. According to June James and

Julia Sugden, owners of the recently established Feminist Bookshop in Sydney, it was one of the store’s bestsellers—up there with Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police, released the same year.8 Nicholson’s book also made an impact overseas. The London-based feminist publisher Virago issued its own revised edition in 1980, adapted for a British readership.9 The success of What Society Does to Girls reflected the wide traction that feminist analyses of sex-role socialisation gained over the course of the 1970s. The book built on a well-established theme—as reflected in the suggested reading section, which was a veritable ‘who’s who’ list of second-wave feminism, featuring French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), among others. Sex roles were not, these authors argued, based in nature, but learned from infancy onwards and dependent on continual reinforcement: by parents, teachers, the media, manufacturers and advertisers. The combined effect was to reinforce female inferiority. Socialisation was the process by which girls and women learned to ‘internalise’ the values of male-dominated society and accept their subordinate state—what Millet referred to as the ‘interiorization of patriarchal ideology’.10 As feminists such as Millet were well aware, the concept of ‘sex-role socialisation’ was not in itself a new one. Sex-role theory had emerged in the 1940s, as sociologists and psychologists became more concerned with how children learnt to identify with their ‘appropriate’ role. Its most famous manifestation can be found in the work of North American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who argued that a clear distinction between the ‘instrumental’ male role and ‘expressive’ female role within the nuclear family was necessary for the proper socialisation of children and wider functioning of society.11 By contrast, feminists in the 1970s sought to use socialisation theory to challenge the inevitability of such roles and their social utility, as well as to devise strategies that would enable women to overcome the effects of their social conditioning. The practice of small-group consciousness raising was one such strategy. Consciousness-raising groups, often held in private homes, proliferated in the early years of the women’s liberation movement. They

offered participants a space in which to interrogate their own experiences of conditioning and the wider effects of sexism on people’s lives. Groups would typically focus on a different subject at each meeting, with women taking turns to describe their thoughts and feelings on the subject.12 Childhood socialisation was a staple topic. As a guide published in the popular North American Ms. magazine in 1972 explained: ‘Most groups find that starting at the beginning works best.’13 In a similar vein, women shared personal stories about their upbringing in the feminist press, with some also drawing attention to the way in which sex-role socialisation intersected with other axes of identity. An early piece published in Mejane in May 1971 recounted the socialisation process as one aimed at reproducing middle-class norms of femininity,14 while some migrant women authors stressed that the female ideal was also an AngloSaxon one. For example, in 1975 Eulalia wrote in Vashti’s Voice of the continual lessons on ‘the do’s and dont’s [sic] of teenage female appearance’ that she had received from school, the media and ‘even the Churchmen’. ‘I knew that this was the Australian way but how could I possibly emulate it? My body was Italian: plump, my hair was Italian, thick and wild, my speech was loud and aggressive’, she reflected.15 Feminist periodicals also encouraged and supported children to question sex-role stereotyping, allowing space for girls’ accounts of the conditioning process. The role of schools in this process was frequently underlined. An article by Lisa in the Sydney feminist newspaper, Mabel on ‘How School Makes You into a Lady’ railed against the requirement to always appear ‘nice’ and ‘neatly groomed’.16 Another Sydney-based publication, the literary journal Cauldron, featured a story by eight-year-old Anna Craney about a girl defying the sexist expectations of her peers and teachers when she catches a burglar at the school, kicking him ‘in the balls’ and then ‘calmly’ tying him up with a rope.17 Girls were aware, too, of how the nuclear family reinforced sex roles, which they saw modelled by their parents. In the inaugural edition of Mejane, Melbourne high school student Jenny Garlick offered a typical explanation of how stereotypical male and female roles were ‘pushed’ onto children in the nuclear family, a subject she felt she could speak about with some authority, given her own and her peers’ experiences:

The majority of students at my school come from lower to middle income families … In these families, the females are taught to accept duties traditionally done by women—cooking, ironing, washing etc. and looking after men. The father goes out to work and comes home to relax … By the time the children reach high school this male-female relationship has been pushed well into their minds.18 Likewise, mothers were prompted to reassess the way they interacted with their children, especially their daughters. Canberra activist Noel Ridgway expressed a common feeling of regret when she recalled the number of sexist nursery rhymes she had unthinkingly recited to her own daughter, from ‘Little Miss Muffet who was frightened away by a spider’ to ‘the girls who cried when Georgie Porgie kissed them’. ‘I now wish I hadn’t relearnt so many rhymes … and blindly indoctrinated her as I had been. The cumulative effect can only be guessed at’, she lamented.19 According to theorists such as Shulamith Firestone, Ridgway was right to be concerned about her collusion in the conditioning process. As we saw in Chapter 1, Firestone argued that women’s role in the psychological formation of their children was key to their joint oppression. This view was one that Summers reiterated in her early article, ‘Free the Children’ (1971), in which she deplored the mother’s role in ‘supervising, moulding and manipulating the existence of the young person’, a process that saw ‘both the child’s and mother’s existences … sacrificed to the imperatives of socialization’.20 Yet it was not just the reinforcement of traditional views about sex roles that mothers needed to worry about. Summers also followed Firestone in objecting to the ‘strait-jacket of conformity’ imposed on children.21 Similarly, Sydney women’s liberationist Suzanne Bellamy suggested in her interview series for Mejane, ‘Children and Liberation’ (1971), that underlying this process was a more fundamental imbalance in power that sensitised children to adult authority in the first place and made it easier to direct their socialisation along conventional lines. Children had two options: they either came to ‘hate’ this authority or to ‘learn to live with it, and shape their behaviour to please it’, she argued.22 What was needed, then, was a comprehensive reassessment of the dynamics of children’s

socialisation, taking into account its role in both inculcating sex roles and producing children’s obedience and social conformity. Bellamy and those who advanced similar views took their lead not just from Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, but also from the wider transnational body of radical literature on childhood that had emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A key influence was British anti-psychiatry theorist R.D. Laing, who famously described the nuclear family as ‘the usual instrument … for getting each new recruit to the human race to behave’.23 Laing’s analysis chimed well with feminist critiques of the nuclear family as a key source of the oppression of women and children (see Chapter 2). The unnamed author of an article on the nuclear family for the Melbourne feminist journal Vashti’s Voice echoed his analysis. One of the nuclear family’s functions, she wrote in 1972, was to ‘press young people into submission in order to help mould them into the authoritarian structure of society as a whole’.24 The writings of radical education theorists were also formative influences. Texts such as Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation (1964), Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) were widely read and debated in Australian feminist circles. The latter—which popularised the idea of a ‘hidden curriculum’ of covert values taught in schools—was especially influential and was reviewed in key women’s liberation publications, as well as leftwing journals that featured feminist perspectives.25 Some women were also exposed to these texts as university students. At campuses across Australia, students and lecturers took part in experiments in inclusive learning, setting up ‘free universities’ that were open to the public,26 and radical education texts became part of the ‘compendium’ trainee teachers read ‘in preparation for teaching the new, young generation’.27 For feminists who were sympathetic to this body of radical literature, the problem of sex-role socialisation could not be separated from a broader critique of adult authority. Ultimately, these processes reinforced one another: the child who learned to accept social authority was far less likely to query his or her designated sex role later in life. Such a perspective had significant ramifications for their attempts to intervene in this process.

Feminists would need to do more than develop non-sexist alternatives: a total revisioning of the adult–child relationship was called for.

Raising ‘Free’ Children In 1973, Sydney feminist Alison Soutter urged readers of the new feminist journal Refractory Girl to share their advice for a childrearing guide for ‘liberated parents’ that she planned to write.28 Soutter’s book, provisionally entitled ‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water’, does not appear to have been published. However, the sort of guide Soutter envisioned was probably much along the lines of those produced during this period in the United States, where there was a larger market for feminist self-help literature.29 One of the earliest and most prolific contributors to this genre was New York-based writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Her classic article, ‘Down with Sexist Upbringing’, featured in the first edition of Ms. magazine in 1971. She spent the next decade writing on the subject, culminating in the publication of her 600-plus-page manual, Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80s (1980).30 Pogrebin was initially charged with the task of writing the Ms. article because she was the only mother on the staff of the new popular feminist magazine. But by the time she had finished writing it, she was convinced that changing parents’ attitudes to childrearing was a critical step in any feminist revolution. The article set out in exhaustive detail the multiple ways in which parents reinforced society’s ‘prejudices’ about gender roles. It started with parents’ choice of clothing (blue and pink were the ‘first label’) and the way they handled their babies: girls ‘get cuddled’ and boys ‘rough-housed’, she explained. Next came the toys and then the hobbies and personal interests: ‘he goes skiing, camping, skin-diving and plays football with Dad. She goes to ballet class, piano lessons, art exhibits and bakes brownies with Mom’.31 If readers thought that this situation sounded ‘familiar’, she recommended a ‘strong dose of non-sexist upbringing’. ‘Open up the options’, she advised them. ‘Let your boy know the challenge of tackling a recipe; let your girl know the challenge of tackling another kid.’32 Pogrebin’s article was one of many articles on the subject of sex-role conditioning collected by members of the Box Hill Women’s Liberation

Group in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. Not long after the group began meeting in 1972, one of its members, sociologist Jan Harper, was invited to speak to a group of mothers from a local school. She told the group that women’s liberation not only ‘provides a focus for all women to build new liberated ways of life’ but ‘a focus for mothers who are trying to bring up their children as liberated human beings’. She urged them ‘to counteract the prevailing tendencies to make little boys and little girls so different’, suggesting that they start by giving dolls to their sons ‘to train them as good fathers’.33 Such advice has since been criticised for inadvertently reinforcing heterosexual norms, with its implicit message that parents need not fear their sons being unduly ‘feminised’ in the process. But if feminist guidance on non-sexist parenting sometimes fell short of more radical visions of gender relations, it nonetheless prompted mothers to think more carefully about the influence that they wielded over their children. Toys were only the tip of the iceberg. A non-sexist upbringing demanded attention to the full spectrum of children’s culture and social activities: children’s books, games, television shows, sporting activities, hobbies and house chores, to name just a few. Sydney mother Deirdre Ferguson’s approach is illustrative. Ferguson joined women’s liberation at its first meeting in January 1970 and played one of the lead roles in an early feminist film production, A Film for Discussion (1973). Her first son was born in 1975 and a second followed in 1978. Ferguson remembered thinking that ‘it didn’t matter whether they were boys or girls, I would bring them up the same way’. Accordingly, she ensured her sons had the option to play with dolls as well as trucks, sourced non-sexist books from a communist bookstore and insisted once they were at high school that they help with the housework. ‘Their job was to sweep and dust and vacuum. I never did it’, she explained.34 While fostering non-sexist values was clearly a high priority, many mothers also believed that their obligations as feminists extended to nurturing their children’s autonomy and self-expression. Suzanne Dixon moved to Canberra in 1972 with a six-month-old, after three years living ‘on the fringes of the counter-culture’ in Scandinavia and London, where she had also joined her first women’s liberation group.35 At the time, she

was committed to what she described as ‘A.S. Neill-type free childrearing’—a reference to the philosophies of the school reformer who founded the early radical education experiment at Summerhill, England, in 1924.36 The same year Dixon moved to Canberra, a notice appeared in the local women’s liberation newsletter seeking out parents ‘who are permissive, progressive, believe in self-regulation, etc.’37 It is not clear if the notice resulted in any responses, but it certainly was not an isolated call for feminists to take up a more ‘progressive’ approach to childrearing. Indeed, these ideals were not just expressed by individual mothers but were explicitly incorporated into policies adopted at some of the first feminist-run child-care centres in the country. For example, a 1975 policy at the Westbury Street Childcare Centre in Melbourne—established two years earlier by the St Kilda Women’s Liberation Group—described the group’s intention to provide a ‘stimulating, yet easy-going, atmosphere’ in which children had ‘freedom of choice and freedom of movement’.38 A later policy document elaborated on this objective. The centre, it explained, not only had a ‘positive policy against sex role conditioning’, including screening literature and games for sex bias, but also emphasised respect for children’s privacy and discouraged competitiveness in relation to friends and possessions. It was, the centre noted, a comprehensive plan for the ‘progressive or radical socialisation of the children’.39 Yet the desire to raise children to be non-sexist was not always easy to reconcile with allowing them greater autonomy. Indeed, in some situations, there was a clear conflict between the two. For example, placing bans on particular items—or as the Westbury Street policy put it more mildly, screening for ‘sex bias’—involved an exercise of adult authority that left some mothers feeling uneasy and could, in any case, be counterproductive, for children frequently found ways to circumvent them. In some cases, there were also competing pressures at play. The risk of censure from other feminists—of being caught out letting one’s child partake in an ‘ideologically unsound’ activity—weighed on at least some women’s minds. In an interview, published in 1976, with the socialist feminist journal Scarlet Woman, one mother described how her son was closely watched by other members of her lesbian feminist household: ‘He’d play with a hammer and it’d be seen as sex role conditioning. Everything was picked

up’.40 Such reports reflected wider tensions within the movement over the policing of other activists’ lifestyles. By the mid-1970s, there was growing concern about the need to ‘conform’ to a particular way of life in order to be considered a ‘true’ feminist.41 Given some mothers’ experience of disapproval of their choice to have children, they were understandably sensitive to the implication that their parenting approach was contributing to ‘patriarchy’. There was also significant irony in the fact that providing a non-sexist upbringing often required more, rather than less, intervention in children’s lives. Mothers found themselves having to carefully manage children’s upbringing—a time-consuming, labour-intensive and potentially costly exercise. Feminist childrearing was hardly a hands-off process and certainly a far cry from Firestone’s version of liberated parenting: in The Dialectic of Sex, she advised that ‘the best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF’.42 Mothers and other caregivers could not escape the contradictions of the socialisation process. Adopting a non-sexist approach to childrearing was commensurable with the ideals of promoting children’s autonomy only up to a point. Even where they could be reconciled, there was also the problem of external influences. Try as feminist mothers might to promote non-sexist values at home, they also had to contend with the potentially ‘contaminating’ effect of peers, other parents, teachers and the media. A more coordinated approach was needed to address these influences, as would become clear in women’s liberationists’ efforts to challenge sexism in children’s books, an issue that attracted concern not only from mothers, but a wider range of activists.

‘Counter-Sexist’ Children’s Books The 1970s have been repeatedly described as a feminist ‘cultural renaissance’ in Australia.43 A plethora of feminist publishers, film-making and art collectives, theatre groups, community radio groups and bands were established over the course of the decade, broadly united in their efforts to promote culture by and for women.44 Feminist publishing arguably represented the most successful strand of this phenomenon, especially in so

far as it encouraged a wider interest in women’s writing.45 Feminist children’s publishing has so far only featured as an afterthought in this wider story.46 Yet it proved to be one of the most effective avenues for activists seeking wider change in the patterns of children’s socialisation. ‘Children’s books are ripe for revolution’, declared Denise Bradley and Mary Mortimer in an article that featured in the inaugural edition of Refractory Girl, published in the summer of 1972–1973. One of the earliest and most widely-cited Australian studies of sex-role socialisation, Bradley and Mortimer’s article analysed children’s books used in primary schools in five states and found that female characters were significantly outnumbered by male characters and were portrayed in a less positive light.47 Even female animal characters suffered from sex-role stereotyping: they were depicted ‘without exception as either foolish or unfortunate in some way’.48 Bradley and Mortimer completed the research as part of their librarianship studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. For Bradley in particular, the topic appealed on both a professional and personal level. A mother of three boys at the time (a fourth son was born in 1974), she ‘had been endlessly reading books to my children and like anybody else who had any feminist consciousness, was horrified by what I was seeing’. When she and Mortimer were in the final stages of completing the study, they were invited to publish their findings in the journal. The article generated significant interest and they were soon in high demand as speakers at conferences and other events. ‘We felt a bit like superstars’, Bradley later recalled.49 Studies like that undertaken by Bradley and Mortimer gave other activists greater confidence to organise around the issue. Bolstered by their findings, women’s liberation groups began to scrutinise the children’s book collections at local libraries, child-care centres and schools. Participants at a conference on women and education held in Adelaide over Easter in 1973 —at which Bradley was a key speaker—called on parents to donate or recommend non-sexist children’s books to preschools.50 The same year in Sydney, the Hurstville Women’s Liberation Group, one of several suburbanbased groups, undertook a survey of children’s books and television with a view to presenting the findings to the education department and ‘eventually modifying the material pushed at kids all the time’.51

Women also began sourcing non-sexist material from overseas. In 1971, the newly established Feminist Press in New York published its first children’s book, Barbara Danish’s The Dragon and the Doctor, a ‘charming’ story about a dragon who is treated by a female doctor and male nurse. That same year, a dedicated feminist children’s book group, Lollipop Power—formed by a group of mothers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina— published three picture books.52 In Australia, these overseas titles were initially only available via mail order, but within a few years they could be found at feminist and other specialist bookshops, such as The Feminist Bookshop in Sydney, which developed a reputation as a welcoming space for mothers and children.53 In Melbourne, Jan Harper and other members of the Box Hill Women’s Liberation Group went a step further. In 1972, they began to write ‘countersexist’ stories of their own, and two years later they formed the Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative (WMCLC).54 The original group was composed primarily of mothers, who, much like Bradley, were frustrated by the pervasiveness of sex-role stereotyping in the books available for their own children. Once its intentions were publicised, the group quickly expanded beyond this base, attracting writers, illustrators and librarians sympathetic to its aims.55 In 1973, members began approaching mainstream publishers with their first manuscripts. Most editors were outright dismissive. ‘Girls Can Do Anything’, a story by Harper about a group of girls playing football was, for example, declared to be ‘too radical’ for a general readership.56 But some editors were more encouraging. David Harris, based at Angus and Robertson, was not only sympathetic to the group’s efforts to ‘de-emphasise traditional sex roles’ but also expressed interest in seeing future manuscripts.57 Eventually, the group determined that their best option was to pursue self-publication. Using funds from its incorporation, the group released its first picture book, The Witch of Grange Grove, in November 1974. The cooperative publicised the book widely, advertising through interstate women’s liberation newsletters and in education journals. These efforts quickly paid off: according to Harper, The Witch of Grange Grove sold like ‘hot cakes’.58 The book even made it as far as Gympie, Queensland, where two teachers hoped that the cooperative’s books would

‘help break down’ their sense of ‘isolation blues’. In February 1975, the cooperative estimated that it had sold over a thousand copies.59 By then, the group had also secured grants through the newlyestablished Australian Schools Commission and the National Advisory Committee for International Women’s Year.60 Bolstered by these external sources of funding, during the next two years, the WMCLC was able to publish a further three picture books, a set of four posters, a guide to ‘counter-sexist’ books, an educational kit and a card game. Initially rejected by mainstream children’s publishers, the cooperative secured a contract with Wren Publishing, which released eight of its books in 1975. Among these were books by Judith Crabtree and Jenny Pausacker, who would go on to become critically acclaimed children’s authors.61 Another coup came in 1976, when feminist publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble organised for numerous short stories by cooperative members to be published in the children’s pages of the Australian Women’s Weekly, which they had been commissioned to produce by the magazine’s editor, Ita Buttrose.62 While the style of these early publications varied significantly, they shared a common philosophy. The cooperative’s books promoted what the group described as a ‘counter-sexist’ message: they portrayed ‘the struggle of individuals and groups of individuals to avoid sex-role stereotyping’.63 Furthermore, most focused on children’s—rather than adults’—resistance to their prescribed sex roles, presenting children as agentic and selfdetermining characters: from a princess who prefers painting to her dolls and tea sets to a boy who takes up knitting with his father.64 In pursuing their ‘counter-sexist’ themes, many of the WMCLC’s books also encouraged young readers to question adult authority, particularly that of their parents and teachers. For example, in Judith Bathie’s Alison and the Bear (1975), the five-year-old heroine ignores the warnings of her parents and sets out on a bear hunt. She returns triumphant with a bear following ‘meekly behind’ and promises to lead ‘[a]ll the boys and girls in her street’ on a hunt the next day.65 In Jenny Pausacker’s The Three Dragons (1975), the main character truants school to visit a group of dragons; the headmaster is portrayed as autocratic, ordering her to be locked in the sick room as punishment. Other books raised broader questions about the

treatment of children. Young people’s access to public space was taken up in one of the short stories in The High Rise Gang (1975) by Judith Crabtree, in which a favourite play area near a housing commission estate—the local tip, full of ‘hidden treasures’—is about to be replaced by a highway.66 The subject was a topical one, with various campaigns organised by residents’ associations in this period—some led by women—in response to the Victorian state government’s proposals for large housing commission blocks and inner-city freeways.67 The setting of The High Rise Gang also signalled the WMCLC’s desire to ensure their books featured characters from a diverse range of backgrounds. In the guide to counter-sexist books she compiled for the group the same year it was published, Pausacker emphasised that the need to confront sex-role stereotypes should not trump other considerations. ‘It would not be good enough to write a book about an intelligent driving female capitalist; or to write books which didn’t discriminate against women, but discriminated against minority groups ... a sort of WASP [white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant] feminism’, she warned.68 In practice, white, middle-class subjects still tended to dominate the group’s publications, but not exclusively. The High Rise Gang was a case in point, featuring characters such as Tilly Tupworth, who lived with her aunt, a factory worker, and her friends Esther Papadopoulos and Candy Spiers. In addition, a concerted effort was made to address the problem of Anglocentrism in a new series of textbooks about career options launched by the group in 1978, with Greek social workers profiled in one of the first four titles released that year.69 The risk that their publications might perpetuate ‘WASP feminism’ was not the only dilemma that WMCLC had to grapple with. Just as feminist mothers worried about imposing their values on their children, the cooperative was forced to respond to criticisms that their books were ideologically driven. Early feedback from publishers suggested that the ‘feminist theme’ was ‘too forced’, while even sympathetic reviewers indicated that their books were overly moralistic.70 Janet Egan, an assistant lecturer at a teachers’ college in Sydney, described the Wren series as a ‘welcome change’, but noted her reservations about the ‘doctrinaire’ style, warning that ‘children usually detect didacticism and shy away from it’.71

Members of the WMCLC responded to such criticisms by emphasising the positive reactions of children to their works. Children ‘easily grasped’ the themes of its books because they resonated with their own lives, Harper explained in a set of guidelines issued in 1975.72 An evaluation of the cooperative’s books, conducted at a working-class primary school in innercity Melbourne in December that year, gave the WMCLC further confidence that its approach was a valid one. Harper’s Girls Can Do Anything (1975)—the story that had been deemed ‘too radical’ by one publisher—was found to be ‘especially appropriate’, as a ‘battle’ over girls playing football at the school had just concluded.73 Nonetheless, as long as their books were written by adults for children, it was difficult for members of the WMCLC to escape the charge of didacticism altogether. The more ambitious solution mooted by Pausacker in her guide to counter-sexist books—that of removing the separate categories of adult and children’s books altogether—was never seriously considered.74 The group ultimately had to concede that their books, like the traditional books they criticised so vehemently, were designed to foster a particular set of values in children. The crucial difference was that the WMCLC openly acknowledged its ‘counter-sexist’ agenda.

Feminism in the Classroom If feminists thought that children’s books were ‘ripe for revolution’, they were even more concerned about the school system. Many activists could still bitterly recall having been treated differently to their male peers, and some had since been able to observe the situation from the other side of the classroom. One needed to be ‘on continual guard against the many subtle— as well as blatant—forms of sexist propaganda’, warned Melbourne teacher Judith in Vashti’s Voice in 1974. She reported with dismay that when she had asked her second-form (Year 8) class who would vote for a girl as a leader, only two students had raised their hands and another ‘crept to halfmast’.75 Teachers such as Judith had their own reasons to be concerned about sexism in the Australian school system. In the early 1970s, women dominated the teaching profession, but remained underrepresented in senior positions.76 Their working conditions were the focus of sustained

campaigning, with women’s groups within teachers’ unions leading calls for changes to the processes for promotion, access to maternity leave and the right to part-time work. Yet, for many feminist teachers, these issues remained secondary to their concerns about sexism inside the classroom. Sydney activist Jozefa Sobski explained: Our major concern was kids. I wouldn’t have continued in a group where the whole preoccupation was with improving the lot of teachers … That’s what I saw as the role of the union and we were very supportive of the union and we often acted in concert with the union. Our role was primarily about improving education for young women and girls in schools.77 Sobski was a young trainee teacher, enrolled in a Diploma of Education at UNSW, when she heard that a new women’s liberation group for teachers was being formed. She was sceptical at first. ‘I felt liberated already so I didn’t see the need, really, to go to a women’s liberation group’, she reflected. But after attending a seminar on sexism in education, Sobski was ‘propelled’ into ‘a different frame of mind’.78 She attended her first women’s liberation meeting in 1972 and went on to become a committed member of the Feminist Teachers Group, later renamed the Women in Education Group. A platform she drafted for the group in 1975 included over forty demands, ranging from the development of women’s studies courses as part of the school curriculum to an end to the use of corporal punishment.79 Women in Education was just one of many local groups that worked to advance the cause of non-sexist education in the 1970s. Their combined outcry at the release of the Karmel Report (1973)—a major governmentcommissioned study of the Australian school system which paid almost no attention to girls’ education, despite identifying girls as one of the most ‘disadvantaged’ groups in the country—was sufficient to prompt the federal education minister to announce a dedicated inquiry on the subject the following year.80 The Australian Schools Commission’s chair, Ken McKinnon, approached Daniela Torsh, a founding member of Women in Education in Sydney, to serve as its executive officer. She helped to advise

on the final composition of the committee, which included prominent feminists and sympathisers, including Elizabeth Reid, the Prime Minister’s women’s advisor, and Susan Ryan, a WEL member who became the Australian Capital Territory’s first female senator in 1975.81 The committee’s report, Girls, School and Society (1975), was released in late November 1975. Running to almost 200 pages, the report systematically detailed the relationship between girls’ socialisation and their educational ‘underachievement’, drawing on sociological research from Australia and overseas, census figures and other government data. The report concluded that the school system operated on the basis of ‘unexamined assumptions about the differences between the sexes’. In turn, it served to limit the life options of both girls and boys, and reinforced the broader societal messages of female inferiority and dependence.82 Education historians Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor cite the report as one of the most successful in ‘a new wave of liberal-progressive reports spawning polices that worked their way through the schools’.83 Certainly, even before the report’s release, it was clear that the inquiry had begun to yield results. While it was still underway, the Schools Commission began funding a range of projects on non-sexist education through its Innovations Program, with the WMCLC among its first beneficiaries. Along with funding from IWY in 1975, this contributed to a plethora of local initiatives to promote non-sexist education, from the establishment of non-sexist resource centres to the development of women’s programs run by teachers’ unions, such as that overseen by Sylvia Innes in Queensland. Even so, activists worried that the momentum created by the inquiry might not be sufficient to withstand the changed political climate after the Whitlam government’s dismissal and the subsequent election of the Fraser government—which took place just a week after the committee’s report was publicly launched. In early 1976, Torsh and Shirley Sampson, a lecturer at Monash University who had been a key supporter of the Schools Commission inquiry, began planning an organised response. They ‘cobbled together’ various feminist education groups from around the country and held a meeting in Melbourne in May 1976, where the Australian Women’s Education Coalition (AWEC) was launched. ‘[S]uddenly there was this fantastic organisation that was pounding on the doors of the Schools

Commission saying “why aren’t you implementing this report?”’, Torsh recalled.84 The continued pressure of AWEC and likeminded groups eventually led to significant policy change. By 1980, all state education departments (except in Queensland) had taken some measures in response to the report, setting up dedicated women’s policy positions, holding inquiries of their own into girls’ education and implementing non-sexist or equal opportunity policies.85 The South Australian government, headed by Labor premier Don Dunstan, was one of the most proactive. In 1977, Denise Bradley—coauthor of the early study on children’s books—was appointed as the first women’s advisor in the state’s education department. As well as advocating for improvements to female teachers’ working conditions, she led curriculum changes to improve girls’ access to maths, science and ‘craft’ subjects (such as carpentry and metalwork) and initiatives to expand their career expectations.86 Feminist policy achievements in promoting non-sexist education have since been recognised as one of the movement’s greatest successes, making Australia ‘notable’ on a ‘world scale’.87 Yet it is important to remember that —just as in other arenas—working ‘inside’ the education system was only one avenue of change pursued by feminist education activists. Even as they worked for policy reform, some of the movement’s most prominent figures, such as Torsh, argued that the only way to eradicate the problem of sexist education was to go outside the conventional school system altogether. In a chapter published in the anthology The Other Half: Women in Australian Society (1975), and written while she was employed at the Schools Commission, Torsh argued that the real solution to girls’ educational disadvantage was to ‘bypass school’ and develop ‘alternatives’ to it.88 Torsh based her argument heavily on the theories of radical educationists. She had first taken an interest in this literature in 1970, during her term as vice president of the Australian Union of Students (AUS), the national body for university students. AUS ‘pushed the whole idea of equality for kids’ and one of the projects Torsh oversaw was an essay competition on the topic ‘The School for Me’, run by the Australian newspaper.89 The product was Schools Out!: Verdicts by Australian Children (1975), co-authored with Ken Newcombe, her successor at AUS.

Its front cover—featuring a child holding onto the bars of a prison-like school gate—left readers with little doubt as to the authors’ sympathies.90 To Torsh’s disappointment, her leanings were not shared by the Schools Commission’s chair, Ken McKinnon—who made it clear from the beginning that ‘the committee does not have a brief to plead complete abolition of educational institutions’.91 Torsh’s interest in radical education emerged as one of several areas of conflict with McKinnon and fellow commissioner Jean Blackburn, who had oversight of the final report and placed more faith in the ‘equalising potential of schooling’.92 They clashed over the lack of recognition given to homosexuality in the section on sex education (see Chapter 4), and Torsh also expressed concerns about cuts made to sections of the report that dealt with the education of migrant girls, Aboriginal girls and girls in rural areas. Torsh was the daughter of Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia; her family had migrated to Australia when she was two years old. At the time that she took on the Schools Commission role, she had ‘a growing sense’ of herself as a migrant, and saw these as important issues to be addressed.93 The draft of the report had featured a separate chapter on each group, but the material was combined into a single chapter on girls with ‘special needs’ in the final version, after Blackburn deemed them to contain too little material ‘specific’ to girls.94 In the process, the discussion of broader issues of racial discrimination was truncated, with the end result being to reinforce the impression that these were not central concerns for feminism. Tellingly, this section of the report would later be criticised for constructing ethnic minority girls in particular in ‘deficit terms’—as victims of ‘tradition’ and a ‘culture clash’, rather than racial exclusion.95 Despite the conflicts that emerged over the report, Torsh did have some small wins, including on the alternative education front. Several alternative schools were consulted during the course of the inquiry,96 and Torsh also made her interest in ‘progressive de-schooling’ known to journalists covering the inquiry, such as the prominent education commentator Lyndsay Connors.97 In addition, a catalogue of resources that she subsequently produced with an Innovations Grant from the commission, ‘Good Morning Boys and Girls’: A Woman’s Education Catalogue (1976),

featured a four-page section on alternative education, immediately preceding a section on children’s rights.98 At the time, alternative schools formed a small but growing segment of the Australian education system, as radical education theorists gained a wider following. Some were small, privately-run schools, typically attracting liberal, middle-class parents and children. Others took the form of government-funded ‘community schools’, with the aim of making these alternatives more widely available.99 As education historian Julie McLeod has recently highlighted, the expansion of alternative schools in this period and the feminist project of non-sexist education were closely related, yet the ‘parallel critiques of social relations, inequalities and the project of schooling as freedom’ that they ‘implicitly shared’ have so far received little historical attention.100 At the time, these connections were not just implicit. Many alternative schools professed a strong commitment to the ideals of non-sexist education, making them an appealing option for feminist parents and teachers. One of the first alternative schools to attract interest from women’s liberationists was Currambena in Lane Cove, Sydney. Set up in 1969 with the support of parents, teachers and academics from Macquarie University, Currambena was privately run by a former state school teacher, Carole Barltrop, and accepted its first students in January 1970.101 The school tried to develop children’s own sense of self-discipline ‘as much as possible’ and to offer projects where they learned to ‘cooperate’ with each other, Barltrop explained in an interview with the feminist newspaper Mejane a year later. Furthermore, the school tried to model gender equality: We don’t discriminate in any way between boys and girls. We all do arts and crafts and boys are just as keen about sewing and cooking and ‘typically’ girls’ tasks as the girls themselves. In fact, some of them even enjoy it more. The girls do the things the boys do as well – there are some lovely big trees at Currumbena [sic] and they all climb them and do all sorts of gymnastics.102 The Mejane collective was obviously impressed, concluding that the school was ‘a welcome refuge’ for parents concerned by sex-role conditioning. But

it was not just Currambena’s commitment to challenging sexism that Mejane found appealing. Just as important were its ‘attempts to avoid traditional power structures’. The newspaper noted that Currambena was ‘not as radical or as exciting as an A.S. Neill school’, and also recognised that its high fees made it prohibitive for low-income families. Nonetheless, Mejane praised Currambena for taking a more egalitarian approach to learning, including allowing children to use the first names of teachers, ‘instead of the distancing terms of authority such as “Sir” or “Miss”’.103 Other alternative schools quickly attracted feminists’ attention. In 1972, Guriganya Community School in Sydney, open to students aged five to fifteen, was the subject of a short black-and-white film by feminist filmmaker Martha Ansara, exploring ‘student self-regulation, new relationships between adults and children and new ideas about what constitutes a learning experience’.104 In Melbourne, teachers and students from Sydney Road Community School, Swinburne Community School, Collingwood Community School and Eltham Community School were regular visitors to the Women’s Liberation Centre, which served as a central meeting place for activists.105 An article on non-sexist education in the alternative culture and lifestyle magazine Pol described idyllic scenes of mixed-sex cooperation and cultural diversity at Sydney Road, which was set up in 1972 as an annexe to Brunswick High School in Melbourne’s inner-city, an area that had a large migrant population. In one section of the school, the boys and girls were learning a Greek dance together, and in another, they were ‘strumming guitars’, the author wrote. In keeping with the ethos of student control, the children also had plans to organise an English language program for parents and to set up a crèche to facilitate their involvement in the school. These initiatives, the article noted, were a response to the challenges faced by migrant and working-class parents who ‘come home too tired to worry about school’.106 Soon feminists were helping to set up new alternative schools. In Canberra, the School Without Walls (SWOW) was established on an informal basis in 1973 and opened officially—with approximately nine teachers and 100 students—in January 1974.107 SWOW was modelled on the Swinburne Community School in Melbourne, but its name was a

reference to the Philadelphia Parkway Program in the United States, the original ‘school without walls’, which had literally operated without a building, instead making use of community resources.108 The name was also suggestive of the anti-authoritarian culture of SWOW. An early proposal for government funding explained that its aim was to create an environment in which ‘the authority structure almost disappears, and the community is one of equals’.109 From the beginning, local women’s liberationists were actively involved in setting up and running SWOW. Amongst the first teachers employed there were Biff Ward and Julia Ryan, both of whom were prominent members of Canberra Women’s Liberation. Indeed, according Ryan, ‘at least half the people … primarily involved in it were feminists’ and she found it difficult to ‘separate what was feminist and what was other ideology coming in there’ in terms of the school’s ethos.110 As a result, feminist concerns were quickly incorporated into the curriculum. The school even developed a women’s studies course, ‘Studies in Sexism’, that received accreditation as part of the ACT matriculation system in 1976.111 SWOW was particularly well known for its strong feminist influences, but was by no means a unique case. For example, in Adelaide, Pat Thomson became the founding coordinator at the Bowden Brompton Community School, which opened in 1977; she had previously been active in the student and anti-war movements, along with women’s liberation.112 Similarly, in Sydney, several members of Women in Education were affiliated with Falcon St Alternative High, which opened the same year. For two of the women involved, a powerful motivation was their concern about their own daughters, who were about to commence high school. The women found the idea of sending them to ‘a single-sex, highly competitive and dehumanised environment … worse than depressing’. The Falcon St Alternative High was supposedly the antithesis to this: it was imagined as a place with ‘no hierarchy between students, teachers, parents and the community’, where ‘decision-making processes’ would be ‘accessible to everyone’ and students would be ‘responsible for their own learning and their own growth’.113 This enthusiasm for the alternative school ethos suggests an easy alliance between non-sexist values and the radical education philosophy.

But in practice, this was not always the case. Eight years after SWOW opened, one insider described it as ‘a good place for budding growing feminists’ and observed that the ‘incorporation of feminist resources and viewpoints’ was amongst ‘the most exciting and inspiring practices’ of the school. Nonetheless, problems remained. The ‘more blatant, revolting sorts of sexism’ had largely been eliminated, but subtle forms continued and the majority of the school was ‘not that motivated’ to try to change this, she wrote.114 An earlier exposé of Falcon St Alternative High, written by Pam Waugh and Victoria Foster and published in Refractory Girl in 1978, was even more scathing. Employed to run a non-sexist education program at the school, Waugh and Foster had been dismayed to find that there was ‘as much scope [for sexism] as in an ordinary school’. The only difference was that the sexism was perpetuated not only by teachers, but also the older male student ‘gang’, who were able to monopolise the advantages of the school’s democratic culture, such as access to a student common room, at the cost of the girls and those boys who ‘identified with non-masculine values’. Waugh and Foster quickly found themselves embroiled in a conflict with these ‘dominating’ male students, precipitating a major crisis in the school community. The conflict culminated in a father leading a charge to discredit the female teachers as motivated by ‘personal problems’ after they attempted to expel two boys.115 From a feminist perspective, the situation was hardly a ringing endorsement for ‘student power’. Even so, Waugh and Foster did not reject the alternative school ethos altogether. Instead, they worked with students to develop a ‘student manifesto—a set of mutual responsibilities’ that they hoped would prevent a recurrence of the problem. It was an ingenious solution, using the very mechanisms of student participation that the male ‘gang’ had previously monopolised. But it was not without some degree of intervention, dependent as it was on ‘the support and help of adults’.116 Waugh and Foster’s account once again illuminates the central paradox behind feminist efforts to counter sex-role conditioning. Ultimately, the mantra ‘educate to liberate’ still put feminists in a position of authority over children, with its implicit assumption that they knew best how to ‘liberate’ them. Even those feminists most sympathetic to critiques of adult power

were forced to justify intervention where they deemed it necessary. Yet they did not do so lightly. Such critiques could not be easily dismissed, as reflected in the level of self-questioning that routinely accompanied the decision to intervene—from the feminist mother’s quandary over what to do with ‘ideologically unsound’ items through to the concerns of teachers such as Waugh and Foster about managing gender hierarchies among students. That the two women continued to see themselves as accountable in some way to their students is revealing. In the end, they were forced to acknowledge that their own actions, even those undertaken in the name of feminism, were not above scrutiny. What these interventions also underline is that challenging sex-role socialisation required self-reflectivity on the part of feminist activists, not only because they were implicated in the process of children’s conditioning in various ways, but because sex-role stereotypes could not be challenged in isolation. Unless children also learnt to resist forms of social conformity and obedience to authority, they would remain liable to various forms of sexist conditioning. While the connection was not always explicitly articulated, efforts to challenge sex-role conditioning almost invariably led activists to also consider the underlying power imbalance between adults and children in some way—and in turn reinforced the need to continue working towards the goal of children’s liberation in its broadest sense.

Chapter 4 What Every Girl Should Know

In 1972, fifteen-year-old Penelope Jackson wrote to the Adelaide women’s liberation journal Liberation to complain about the treatment she had received on a recent visit to her doctor. When the sexually active teenager had enquired about alternatives to taking the pill, the doctor ‘glared then gave a heavy sigh’, complaining that, had she told him earlier in the appointment, he could have measured her for a diaphragm. He did not offer to do so now—‘it was me getting pregnant, not him’—so she left the surgery empty-handed.1 Jackson’s frustration at her male doctor’s indifference would certainly have resonated with many of the adult readers of Liberation. It spoke to a central feminist concern: male medical authorities’ control over women’s bodies in general, and female sexuality in particular. For Jackson, however, it was her age—not just her sex—that made the incident noteworthy. Jackson was a year below the legal age of consent in South Australia, then sixteen years for heterosexual intercourse. ‘Why should I feel about two feet tall with my doctor and every other man because I’m a woman and a child—fucking without the state’s consent?’, she asked.2 Proclaiming her right to sexual freedom and rejecting the role of a protective state, Jackson placed children’s sexual liberation on an equal footing with that of women. Many activists within Australian women’s liberation shared this commitment to extending children’s sexual freedoms, and not just those of

teenagers such as Jackson. They would come to see restrictions on children’s sexuality, and especially girls’ sexuality, as a key feminist concern, not least of all because they saw direct parallels with the experience of women. As Brisbane activists declared in a pamphlet disseminated at high schools in 1971, the same ‘sexually negative culture’ that oppressed women’s sexuality also required the ‘repression of the young’.3 Yet their forays into this area would also present various challenges for the children’s liberation paradigm, as feminists found themselves positioned as arbiters of children’s sexual rights on the one hand, and sexual risk and vulnerability on the other. That the question of children’s sexuality produced mixed responses is unsurprising given the complexities of feminist sexual politics more generally. Part of the wider sexual revolution of the period, female sexual empowerment was consistently at the forefront of early women’s liberationist thinking, with the Australian movement especially notable in terms of its links to earlier sexual libertarian groups.4 Access to contraception and safe abortion, so that women would be able to enjoy sex free from the fear of pregnancy, quickly emerged as a key demand of the movement—although not an unproblematic one, as Indigenous women would go on to highlight, drawing attention to their own experiences of forced abortion and sterilisation.5 Lesbian women also challenged the heterosexual focus of this agenda and increasingly played a more visible role in the movement from the mid-1970s onwards, reinvigorating discussions of female sexual pleasure and identity.6 At the same time, women’s liberation’s relationship to the sexual revolution was not an uncritical one. The emphasis on sexual liberation was also accompanied by critiques of sexuality as a central site of male power and privilege. Some of the first actions by women’s liberationists targeted beauty contests and advertising companies for their role in perpetuating the ‘sexual objectification’ of women.7 Rape was also addressed in some of the earliest movement literature and, by the second half of the 1970s, was increasingly seen as ‘a paramount manifestation of women’s oppression’.8 Some activists and scholars have since equated the growing focus on sexual violence in the later years of the decade with increasing negativity around sex.9 More recently, however, it has been suggested that this tendency was

less pronounced in the Australian context than elsewhere, particularly the United States, where the ‘sex wars’ produced major schisms within the feminist movement.10 Children’s sexuality provides a valuable lens through which to reassess feminist sexual politics in this period, as well as the movement’s wider impact on public discussions of sexual intimacy and relationships. Given their concerns about sexual violence—including child sexual abuse, discussed in the next chapter—most activists stopped short of supporting the most radical calls for children’s sexual liberation made by some other groups in this period. Even so, an emphasis on children’s sexual agency remained a consistent feature of feminist activism throughout the 1970s as activists endeavoured to expand children’s rights to sexual pleasure, knowledge and bodily autonomy in a range of ways that powerfully challenged prevailing assumptions about children’s sexual innocence. This chapter highlights the debates that ensued as activists sought to promote greater sexual openness for their own children, as well as a diverse range of initiatives aimed at improving sex education and upholding teenage girls’ ‘right to choose’.

Sexual Oppression in Childhood The 1960s and early 1970s saw a fundamental transformation in popular understandings of sex. With the sexual revolution came an increasing emphasis on sexual pleasure as central to personal fulfilment; as historian Frank Bongiorno notes, it placed ‘erotic life at the centre of the human personality’.11 This transformation not only provided the basis for new rights claims on the part of women and sexual minorities, but also shaped popular thinking about children’s sexuality. Calls for children’s sexual liberation came from multiple sources, but no text generated as much heated public debate over the subject as The Little Red Schoolbook (1969). The Danish handbook of student rights arrived in Australia in April 1972 and quickly became a symbol of the contested sexual politics of the era. A local version, with content revised to include information on relevant laws, was produced by the New Zealand publisher, Alister Taylor. It included some twenty-eight pages on sex, with an enjoinder that ‘[p]eople who warn you against both strong feelings and sex

are as a rule afraid of both … Judge for yourself, from your own experiences’.12 Most of the text was devoted to practical advice on contraception and venereal disease, but it also covered topics ranging from masturbation to pornography. It was this content that gave rise to much of the controversy around the text. Attempts to ban the book in schools in several states prompted nationwide protests. Extracts from the book were reproduced and distributed free around the country in an attempt to circumvent the bans, including in Sydney, where anti-censorship activist and women’s liberationist Wendy Bacon organised for copies of the text to be published and handed out at schools.13 The opposition aroused by The Little Red Schoolbook did not come as a surprise to Australian women’s liberationists. In July 1971, British publisher Richard Handyside had been tried for obscenity after publishing the English edition of the book, leading to a fine and an order that the copies seized in an earlier police raid be destroyed.14 The same year also saw the three editors of the underground magazine Oz, including Australian expatriates Richard Neville and Jim Anderson, accused of obscenity and conspiring to ‘debauch and corrupt the morals of young children’ over ‘The Schoolkids Issue’, published in 1970. ‘More freedom was everybody’s cry … give us the freedom to smoke, to dress, to have sex, to run school affairs’, the editors proclaimed in their introduction to the issue, purporting to summarise the views of the twenty-odd high school students who collaborated on the issue.15 The editors were initially found guilty and awarded prison sentences, but won their case on appeal in November 1971.16 Well before the arrival of The Little Red Schoolbook in Australia, these events had piqued the interest of Australian activists. In her article on children’s liberation for the University of Adelaide student newspaper On Dit in September 1971—two months before the Oz editors eventually won their case on appeal—Anne Summers deplored these ‘examples of establishment crack-downs to prevent children having access to material that recognises their sexuality’. Echoing the work of Shulamith Firestone, she identified sexuality as the context in which ‘the most strictly enforced taboos’ on children were apparent, serving to demarcate a false division between children and adults. Censorship, as evidenced in these cases, was a

prime case in point. Stemming from a belief that children needed to be protected from ‘such “adult” preoccupations’, censorship attempted to prevent children from being ‘in any way stimulated to explore their own sexuality’.17 Women’s liberationists also had their own reasons to be concerned about the censorship of these texts. The same month that Summers’ article was published in On Dit, police raided the International Bookshop in Melbourne, managed by communist and women’s liberationist Kathie Gleeson. The raids were prompted by the sale of the underground journal Troll, which included ‘The Schoolkids Issue’ of Oz as a supplement.18 Other radical literature was also seized, including copies of the latest edition of Mejane, which included a salacious article entitled ‘Sex: Outside the Laboratory’.19 A five-day trial followed in February 1972, at which expert evidence on the texts’ merits was provided by, among others, Germaine Greer, who was in Australia at the time for her book tour. The activists had a partial victory: the Mejane edition was successfully defended on the basis of its literary merit, but the remaining copies of Troll were ordered to be destroyed.20 While neither The Little Red Schoolbook nor the ‘The Schoolkids Issue’ of Oz were specifically feminist texts, they advanced a view of children’s sexual freedom that activists such as Summers clearly found compelling— all the more so given the movement’s anti-censorship stance. Summers returned to the theme of children’s sexual oppression at some length in her classic text, Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975). Here she offered a more detailed account of the ways in which children’s sexuality was inhibited. The view of sex as ‘a furtive, even dirty activity’ was instilled from a young age, she argued: masturbation was discouraged, sexual questions resulted in reprimands, parents’ own sexual activity was carefully hidden, and bathing or sharing rooms with siblings of the opposite sex was frowned upon after reaching ‘the age of sexual curiosity’. As with many other aspects of children’s oppression, Summers considered the nuclear family to play a major role in this process. ‘Children are subjected to the control of their parents in every other respect so the repression of their sexuality … fits easily and unobtrusively into the overall parent–child relationship’, she wrote.21

The role of the nuclear family in enforcing prohibitions on young children’s sexual experience and knowledge was similarly attested to by other activists, often drawing on their own experience. In movement publications, women discussed how their own sexuality had been repressed in childhood, including through punishments they received when found masturbating, a lack of physical affection in the home, insistence on modesty and a general lack of discussion about sex and bodies. In Vashti’s Voice, Judy described the punishment that followed when, at the age of four, a boy showed her his penis; the boy’s mother ‘was so angry she belted him with a wooden clothes line prop hard enough to break it’.22 Another contributor to the journal, Kathie, recalled that her ‘progressive enlightened’ working-class family did not offer ‘a lot of loving, touching sort of affection’ and that sex was treated with ‘the usual double standard of dirty jokes … and a puritan absence of discussion on a personal level’. Furthermore, sex was strictly heterosexual: ‘Anything else was taboo’.23 Freud’s work also informed feminists’ understanding of the nuclear family as the locus of children’s sexual oppression. Although critical of his writings on female sexuality, especially his theory of ‘penis envy’, feminists also identified Freud as a forward thinker and renegade in his treatment of children’s sexuality as inherent rather than an aberration.24 His work on infantile sexuality, Summers noted in her On Dit article, ‘was considered to be the most shocking aspect of his theories’.25 British socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell’s book Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) went a step further, reclaiming Freud for feminism and arguing that his theories had been misunderstood as prescriptive: ‘psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one’, she declared.26 These observations in turn led women’s liberationists to emphasise the radical potential of children’s sexual liberation. Once released from the regulating forces of society, they argued, children would be able to express themselves freely and more ‘authentically’, challenging the sexually repressive culture of wider society. Outlining her vision for a communal household in rural Italy, Germaine Greer suggested that children ‘would not have to be strictly persuaded out of sexual experimentation with peers, an unnatural restriction’.27 The bestselling North American women’s health

manual Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) took a more practical approach and included various stories from feminist mothers celebrating their young daughters’ uninhibited sexuality. One woman, for example, reflected on her daughter rubbing her crotch without ‘awkwardness’ or ‘hesitation’.28 As North American scholar N’Jai-An Elizabeth Patters has observed, the ‘innocence’ of children’s sexuality was re-imagined not as ‘ignorance of sexual desire or pleasure, but rather … as a natural and innate knowledge that had yet to be corrupted by external pressures’.29 Accordingly, activists invested considerable hope in the possibility of raising a new generation for whom sexual pleasure would no longer be a source of guilt and shame, starting with their own children.

Feminist Parenting and Sexual Openness In July 1973, a letter by a mother, addressed to her seven-year-old daughter, appeared in Mejane, imparting several lessons from her involvement in women’s liberation, including on the critical subject of sexuality. A common ‘trick’ played on girls was that ‘sex is only for making babies’, she warned. By contrast, she hoped that her daughter would learn that ‘sex is for you to enjoy in the ways you like best’.30 The letter reflected a desire for a greater openness about sex that was shared by many feminist mothers in the 1970s and that movement texts, such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, actively encouraged. Creating such an environment required a concerted effort to break down sexual taboos for both adults and children, and presented feminism with its first test of what kinds of sexual freedoms might be extended to young children in particular. The starting point for many feminist mothers was to provide accurate sex education for children that would help them to see sex as a pleasurable act. This was, however, made difficult by the lack of material available. In the counter-sexist book guide she produced for the Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative (WMCLC) in 1975, children’s author Jenny Pausacker lamented, ‘Everyone knows that the way sex is dealt with in children’s books is dead hopeless.’ In the fiction category, children’s books addressing sexuality typically followed the ‘problem novel’ format.31 Furthermore, Pausacker found ‘no books at all that dealt honestly with lesbianism and only three that dealt with male homosexuality, all of which

were terrible’.32 The options were better in the non-fiction category, but most were aimed at teenagers rather than younger readers. Aware of the limitations of mainstream offerings, feminist and other radical bookshops went to some effort to source suitable material. The Doctor Duncan Bookshop in Adelaide, for example, featured the picture book How a Baby is Made (1971), by Per Holm Knudsen, in a two-page spread on non-sexist children’s books. The Danish text’s comic-style format ensured it was not just another ‘segregated away sex education book’, the bookshop noted. Nonetheless, it was ‘technical’ and needed to be read aloud. Furthermore, like many texts, it was framed exclusively in terms of heterosexual reproductive sex.33 While providing accurate and holistic sex education was an important first step, enabling children to freely explore their sexuality required more significant interventions. Feminist mothers challenged the very assumption that children needed to be protected from any knowledge of sex. To that end, in May 1973, the North Shore Group in Sydney considered a protest action directed against ‘bureaucrats deciding for us which films are suitable for our children to see’, in which they would pick an R-rated film and demand admission for themselves and their children.34 Others emphasised the importance of openly acknowledging parents’ own sexuality, for example, by showing physical and sexual affection in front of children and introducing children to parents’ sexual partners. Just as it reflected the collective child-care principles of the period, feminist author Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) encapsulated the ethos of sexual liberation, depicting a lifestyle in which there was little attempt to protect children from knowledge of adults’ sexuality or drug use. However, some mothers would find it easier than others to model this kind of sexual openness. Elsewhere, Garner suggested that single mothers might find it especially difficult to embrace their own sexual desires, given the demands of parenting. Not only did being a single parent reduce one’s mobility ‘to almost zero’, but the emotional demands of caring for a child also made it more difficult to ‘live a sexually free life … You feel so assaulted by your child’s need of you that you slip easily into the condition of wanting to be number one for someone else’, she explained in the Melbourne Feminist Collection (1973).35 In this sense, the ideal of

children’s sexual liberation did not necessarily circumvent the problem of women’s obligation to their children, sometimes at the expense of their own desires and pleasures. For some mothers, there were also material risks involved in flouting sexual norms, potentially making it more difficult to be open about one’s sexuality and sexual relationships. Women on the supporting mother’s benefit needed to take care not to breach the cohabitation test, under which women were deemed ineligible if they lived with a man on a de facto basis. Feminists’ concerns that the test enabled ‘sex snooping’ by social security authorities were borne out in the case of an Aboriginal mother, Karen Duncan, who was denied the benefit after she admitted to having seen her ex-partner and having sex with him. Her case was taken up by a group of Brisbane women’s liberationists, Indigenous activists and students—in a notable case of coalition work, given Indigenous women’s increasingly vocal criticisms of white feminists during this period—after she had been left incomeless for several weeks while waiting on the outcome of an appeal. After the group occupied the Australian Government Centre in Brisbane on 26 March 1975, the Minister for Social Security, Bill Hayden, intervened in the case and Duncan’s payment was granted.36 Later that year, the department issued a policy outlining factors to be considered in assessing a recipient’s personal situation and directing social security officers not to question them about their sexual relations, although subsequent cases suggest that the policy was not always heeded.37 Similarly, there were material risks involved for lesbian mothers engaged in family court proceedings, who faced the possibility of custody being denied unless they agreed to curtail their sexual relationships or ensure their children were not exposed to them. As historian Rebecca Jennings observes, lesbian mothers found themselves ‘caught between two opposing political agendas’: the feminist and gay liberation agenda of coming out and the court’s insistence on discretion.38 By the second half of the 1970s, ‘the right to bring up children whilst openly living a lesbian lifestyle’ was increasingly incorporated into lesbian feminist political agendas and support groups were set up for lesbian mothers contending with the court process.39 Many of the same activists were also involved in campaigns in support of lesbian and gay teachers (discussed further below)

—the idea that homosexuality represented a threat to children was a pervasive one and demanded action on multiple fronts. Feminists’ claims to advance children’s own rights to sexual expression provide the most powerful evidence of their optimistic view of children’s sexuality. Feminist self-help literature such as Our Bodies, Ourselves emphasised that feeling comfortable with one’s own body was an essential precursor to being able to freely express one’s sexuality. The principle was easily extended to children. For example, Robyn Lilith’s photographic book, What Children Do (1975)—produced as part of the Wren series that also included books by the WMCLC—incorporated a scene of children playing without clothes and another of them bathing together as part of its depiction of a day in the life of three young siblings. There was, the book implied, nothing exceptional about nudity; it was simply part of ‘what children do’. Likewise, at the Neighbourhood Children’s Centre in Canberra, children were said to demonstrate ‘open and natural acceptance of nakedness’ as a result of swimming together and using mixed toilets. Reporting on the centre’s approach in Refractory Girl in 1977, Canberra activist Noel Ridgway asserted, ‘Knowledge of their bodies extends naturally to coping sensibly and openly with their developing sexuality’.40 Nudity in these contexts was desexualised, but with an understanding that in the process, children would develop a stronger sense of bodily awareness that was central to sexual enjoyment. Women’s liberationists also saw masturbation as a means of helping children to gain access to sexual pleasure by and for themselves, in the same way that it did for women.41 The ‘permissive’ childrearing advice of the post-war era, influenced by the popularisation of Freud’s work, had already seen a shift away from earlier disciplinary discourses towards a view that masturbation was a normal stage of development that should not be interrupted.42 Feminist literature went further, suggesting that children— and girls especially—should be actively encouraged to do so. ‘I like playing with my clitoris’, one girl remarked in My Body Feels Good (1974), a children’s picture book that Melbourne activists sourced from the New York-based Feminist Press. Much like nudity in What Children Do, here masturbation was presented as a legitimate and normal source of pleasure for children, no different to other ‘natural’ acts, from sucking a thumb to

rubbing a cloth against a cheek to the ‘gushy feeling of playing in the mud’.43 It was one thing to encourage children’s sexual expression at an individual level. The question of young children’s sexual relations with others was, however, a more complex matter. Some activists argued that children should be allowed to engage in sexual activity with their peers, albeit within certain boundaries. For example, parents at the Westbury Street Child Care Centre in Melbourne expressed a view that sex play was ‘part of any child’s play pattern and growth’, with the qualification that an adult might intervene ‘if we felt that a child may be physically hurt’. They viewed this position as consistent with their broader commitment to the ‘progressive or radical socialisation of children’ (see Chapter 3).44 The question of children’s agency in sexual encounters with adults was far more contentious. The subject was openly debated in sections of the gay liberation movement at the time, prompted, in part, by the imposition of different age-of-consent laws when the first moves towards decriminalisation of male homosexuality took place. Legislation passed in South Australia in 1972 initially set the age of consent for homosexual intercourse at twenty-one years (compared to sixteen for heterosexual intercourse); the age of consent was subsequently equalised in 1976.45 That same year, the Australian Capital Territory decriminalised private homosexual intercourse and set the age of consent at eighteen (compared to sixteen for heterosexual intercourse).46 These discrepancies provoked a wider discussion over the taboos of intergenerational sex, with some gay liberationists taking the position that prohibitions on child–adult sex simply reinforced notions of childhood innocence and incompetency when it came to sexual decision-making.47 This position was not dissimilar to that put forward by Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex.Firestone had called for the lifting of the ‘taboo’ on childadult sex, arguing that children should be able to take part in ‘as much genital sex’ as they were ‘capable of’.48 Yet how children’s capacity was to be determined was left unresolved, and as women’s liberationists became increasingly focused on the subject of sexual violence (see Chapter 5), they also grew more wary of arguments for children’s sexual liberation being used to justify paedophilia. At the same time, many feminists

acknowledged that age-of-consent laws were problematic. Not only did they imply that there was a uniform age at which one became capable of consenting to sex, but such laws could have punitive consequences for young people, including impeding access to contraception and abortion, an issue I return to later in this chapter. Among women’s liberationists, the question of permissible sexual relations across ages also arose in relation to the ‘natural’ sensory pleasure between mothers and children. A talk on the ABC’s Australian Women’s Broadcasting Cooperative’s ‘Coming Out’ show on 26 February 1977, republished in Refractory Girl later that year, reflected on the social taboos around physical touch, including in the context of the mother–child relationship. The author identified women’s guilt at potentially feeling aroused when breastfeeding not only as a source of unnecessary worry for mothers, but as harmful for children too. Such taboos created an atmosphere of anxiety around the body that meant they were ‘not helped to understand their own body tension; their own body feelings, nor to explore themselves and to listen to and feel their body states’.49 Yet women’s liberationists were also unsettled by the uncertainty of the erotic boundaries between themselves and their children. For example, in a short piece in the Victorian Australian Union of Students (AUS) Women’s Collective’s booklet, Sexuality (1975), Lorna outlined the dilemma presented by her children’s curiosity about her body and their desire to explore it: ‘To touch, to stroke, to explore your body, to play with your breasts, to push toes and feet in among your pubic hairs.’ Lorna’s first instinct was to ‘bring the activity to an end’, but she worried that this was based on false social constraints. ‘Once we thought sex between girls or women was inappropriate. How do we decide or know what will be inappropriate in our physical relations with our children?’, she queried. As such, Lorna decided instead to ‘let the exploration go on, mostly passive, relying on the child to find and lead the way, but nervous and less responsive than I could be’. The inclusion of her account in the Sexuality collection left open the question of the ‘should and should nots’ of intergenerational sexual relations, inviting further deliberation amongst feminists over the nature of children’s agency and consent in this context.50

Sex Education in Schools While feminist mothers had an important role to play in promoting a more open approach to children’s sexuality, women’s liberationists also wanted to ensure that their message of sexual empowerment had a wider impact and that it reached teenage girls in particular. Activists quickly recognised that they would need to target schools if they were to achieve their goal of promoting frank and accurate knowledge about sex, pleasure and reproductive control. In early 1971, Adelaide Women’s Liberation published the Australian movement’s first sexual health guide. Entitled What Every Girl Should Know About Contraception, it aimed to ‘inform’ readers so that they could make their ‘own ethical decision about virginity, contraception, abortion and “promiscuity”’.51 The booklet was not, according to Adelaide activist Sylvia Kinder, ‘a particularly political document’.52 Nonetheless, the decision to distribute the guide outside local high schools was a radical one, calculated to challenge the authority of both parents and schools to determine what kind of information girls were permitted to access. At the time, sex education did not feature as part of the formal curriculum of South Australian schools. But the situation was beginning to change due, in part, to pressure from feminist groups. Two years later, in 1973, the state education department began trialling a new health curriculum that incorporated sex education, though parents had the right to withdraw their children from classes.53 The decision was part of a trend towards the introduction of sex education in Australian schools, reflecting ‘a new pedagogical emphasis on the education of the “whole” child’.54 By the end of the decade, sex education programs had been introduced in all states and territories except Queensland.55 While welcoming these developments, many feminists remained concerned that the information provided by schools was inadequate, and they continued their efforts to bring the message of sexual liberation into schools directly. The earliest of these initiatives followed on from the example set by Adelaide Women’s Liberation. In July 1971, the Women’s Liberation Working Women’s Group in Sydney produced a modified version of What Every Girl Should Know, updating it with the help of feminist doctor Stefania Siedlecky and retitling it What Every Woman

Should Know.56 This was a source of some consternation to those who produced the original version, as they had quite deliberately chosen the title in view of their ‘intended’ audience.57 But the new name was more likely to have been a reflection of the Sydney activists’ view that the word ‘girl’ was demeaning to women readers, rather than a shift in priorities. The group saw dissemination of the pamphlet to high school girls as a key objective and placed considerable weight on their responses as a measure of their success. ‘We have only had to stand at the gate of each school and announce our presence and they did the rest’, the group reported.58 Rebecca Davies was one such high school student who benefited, writing to Mejane in November 1971 to express her thanks for the pamphlet, which ‘we’ve all found … tremendously useful’. She asked the collective to send more copies—‘as many … as possible’—because ‘the need for something like this is really great’.59 By this stage, over 6000 copies had already been distributed and another 10000 ordered, some of which made their way to other parts of the country.60 While the What Every Woman Should Know pamphlet was particularly well known, it was far from the only initiative of this kind. In October 1971, Brisbane women’s liberationists produced a double-sided pamphlet on Female Sexuality and Education, which they handed out at a number of school gates. The pamphlet was intended to be both educative and a call to action, with high-school students encouraged to agitate for sex education classes in their schools, to join women’s liberation or to start their own groups.61 Two years later, Perth Women’s Liberation sought permission from the Family Planning Association to reproduce a pamphlet on contraception and make it available to high school students. The group received the endorsement of the Secondary Student Union of Western Australia, who issued a press release affirming its belief in ‘the right of every person to have sexual relations without living in fear of unwanted pregnancies’ and support for ‘any attempt to make this information available to High School Students’.62 These initiatives invariably incited sensationalist media coverage and opposition from conservative politicians and lobby groups. In Sydney, the political ties of some members of the group that produced What Every Woman Should Know—which included, amongst others, long-time

communist Joyce Stevens—saw it accused of creating a ‘communist experiment’. Liberal Party politician John Gordon Thorne Jackett mounted a concerted campaign against the group and a police investigation took place, although no charges were laid.63 Meanwhile, Brisbane Women’s Liberation’s post box number was revoked ‘without any recourse to rational explanation nor even to regulations’.64 One activist, Claire McClusky, was tried in February 1972 for distributing obscene material. In a letter to their Sydney counterparts, the Brisbane activists emphasised the ‘really bad’ situation in Queensland: ‘You may not appreciate it, but things ARE better in NSW.’65 In Perth too, women’s liberationists noted the ‘hysterical response’ and ‘sensational headlines’ that their pamphlets provoked: The conclusions drawn by many clearly showed that people had not even read the pamphlets, merely assumed that if they were about contraceptives, written by Women’s Liberationists, they must be promoting the promiscuous depravity of the young.66 Such reactions only further underlined, for women’s liberationists, the power that school authorities exercised over children and the radical challenge that their interventions posed. A pamphlet circulated within women’s liberation networks about the situation in Brisbane described the official responses as evidence that teenage girls were oppressed by their ‘owner-parents’ and ‘warden-schools’. At the same time, the conservative backlash prompted defensive responses that exposed protectionist thinking on the part of feminists as well. Thus, the same pamphlet presented the case for sex education in terms of the need to ensure that girls ‘do not find their way’ into the statistics on abortion, ‘illegitimate’ pregnancies and venereal disease.67 That the main focus of these various pamphlets was on providing advice about sexual health and contraception is telling; such advice was primarily designed to minimise the risks posed by sexual activity rather than actively encourage sexual experimentation. By contrast, there were other interventions by women’s liberationists in this early period that sought to go further, providing students with candid advice about sexual pleasure itself. Most famously, Helen Garner, then a high school teacher, led an explicit discussion about sex with her first form

(Year 7) class at Fitzroy High School in Melbourne, in which she was asked what it was like to ‘fuck’ and whether she had ‘suck[ed]’ a ‘cock’.68 The incident—which Garner described in an anonymous article published in the countercultural magazine Digger—ultimately led to her sacking in December 1972, an event which generated significant media attention and saw 2000 teachers take part in a one-day stop-work meeting by the Victorian Secondary Teachers’ Association in early 1973. The Digger also received an obscenity writ and was fined $500 for the story, which was increased to $750 when the newspaper unsuccessfully appealed the charge in Melbourne’s County Court.69 Garner has since equated her efforts with a sense of solidarity with her students, reminiscing that the conversation was a ‘privileged moment, in the working lives of twenty-nine children and their teacher’.70 This view was also expressed at the time by those who defended Garner’s actions, including Sydney activist Daniela Torsh, who described the sacking as evidence of the oppressive nature of the school system, which did not recognise children’s own sexual knowledge. ‘The language she used was familiar to the students but it was foreign to the bureaucrats at the Department of Education’, Torsh dryly observed.71 Others were more sceptical, however. Reflecting back on the episode in the late 1990s, feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti accused Garner of taking advantage of the media generated by the situation to the detriment of the school’s reputation and its mostly migrant student population. Above all, Braidotti objected to Garner’s ‘ethnocentric’ perspective and by association the racial and sexual politics of women’s liberation. ‘Garner loves those children, but finds them in sad need of enlightenment from her Anglo-Australian wisdom as a sex radical’, she wrote.72 Bradiotti had a personal interest in the debate; she had enrolled as a student at Fitzroy High School in 1971 after her family migrated from Italy, and had just completed her final examinations at the time of Garner’s dismissal.73 Garner’s intervention was the most public and controversial example of feminist teachers taking the issue of sex education into their own hands. Historians Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett go so far as to describe her sacking as the ‘culminating pedagogical controversy of the time’.74 But Garner was not alone in testing the boundaries of what was permissible in

the classroom. When a group of Sydney activists visited Wiley Park Girls High School in March 1973, they found the girls eager to discuss the topic and were themselves confronted by the extent of the girls’ sexual experience.‘[I]n my nice, middleclass way, I was somewhat taken aback at the number of these “school girls” who were fucking regularly, apparently without contraceptives’, Linda Young confessed.75 Like Garner, they found themselves in trouble for broaching the subject of sexuality with the students, with the headmistress banning them from the school. Yet not all schools reacted negatively to these initiatives. As women’s liberation became more established, activists found themselves being approached for advice and materials by sympathetic teachers. By 1974, the Women’s Liberation Centre in Melbourne had begun receiving requests from schools for talks on subjects such as birth control, venereal disease and abortion.76 That year, the newly opened Leichhardt Community Women’s Health Centre in Sydney’s inner west ran a four-week program called ‘When You Are Woman: Our Bodies Ourselves’ for fourth-form (Year 10) students at the local girls’ high school.77 The centre continued running sex education courses in the coming years, including a ten-week project for migrant girls in 1981, building on the centre’s longstanding connections with the local multicultural community. As well as employing multilingual staff, the centre ran a range of migrant discussion groups, including an Italian women’s discussion group that had started in 1977 and whose members ranged in age from fifteen to eighty.78 These credentials made its work in this area less liable to the criticisms of Anglo-centrism directed at Garner. In some cases, feminist sex education material even made its way into schools with the support of government funding. The Role Your Own (1976) kit produced by Jenny Pausacker for the WMCLC in Melbourne, with funding from an International Women’s Year grant, included a two-page section on sexuality. It forthrightly discussed orgasm, describing it as a ‘warm and tingling’ feeling that eventually ‘touches a high point and slips away, leaving you feeling relaxed’.79 And while most of the existing sex education initiatives were framed exclusively in heterosexual terms, Role Your Own openly addressed homosexuality. The text suggested to students that prohibitions on homosexual men and lesbian women who ‘choose to

freely have sex together’ were evidence of the ‘old idea that says sex which leads to pregnancy is more important than people having good feelings about each other’. It encouraged students to form their own views on the subject, with the following advice: ‘If you can’t decide, ask a speaker from Gay Liberation to tell you more about it’.80 Having anticipated some resistance from schools to this section of the kit, the WMCLC was pleased to find that backlash was relatively rare; an evaluation of its use in thirtythree schools found only two cases of teachers having ‘censored’ the section.81 The attention given to homosexuality in the Role Your Own kit—if only briefly—points to the changing emphases in feminist sexual politics in this period. By 1976, when the kit was published, lesbian activists had become a strong presence within women’s liberation—Pausacker, for example, was actively involved in lesbian feminist politics and, a decade later, wrote Australia’s first children’s book with a gay main character, What Are Ya? (1987).82 At the landmark Women’s Health in a Changing Society conference, held at the University of Queensland during International Women’s Year in August 1975, Melbourne activists Jocelyn Clarke and Laurie Bebbington proposed a motion calling for sex education courses in schools ‘to present a realistic view of alternative lifestyles in the community’ and not just emphasise ‘an exclusively heterosexual model’.83 Although a number of other motions addressed sex education, theirs was the only one to refer to homosexuality, and the conference organisers were also criticised more generally for failing to include lesbianism as a theme.84 Lesbian sexuality was also missing from the chapter on ‘sexuality and human relations’ in the otherwise much-celebrated Australian Schools Commission’s report, Girls, School and Society (1975).85 A statement calling for recognition of ‘the possibility of homosexuality as an equally valid sexual choice’ had initially been included in the interim report prepared by the committee appointed to oversee the Schools Commission’s inquiry.86 It was, however, deleted from the final report, at the instigation of Jean Blackburn, who worried that its inclusion would ‘jeopardise other things that we wanted to say’.87 Committee member David Widdup—a well-known figure in the gay rights movement—lamented in a letter to the other members that ‘(sadly) the consideration given to lesbians in our report

is less than was given to women in “Schools in Australia”’, a pointed reference to the Interim School Commission’s earlier Karmel report, which had included only one paragraph on girls’ educational disadvantage (see Chapter 3).88 The omission would no doubt have also disappointed Canberra high school student Manda Biles. In a letter to the committee’s executive officer, Daniela Torsh, sent in August 1974, Biles had protested these inequities in the school system. Her letter expressed concerns about other students’ negative attitudes to homosexuality, suggesting that one of the reasons ‘school kids ridicule it so much [is] because it questions the image of the “real man” or the “real woman”’. Biles had thought of inviting a speaker from gay liberation to speak at her school but suspected the request would not be allowed. The inquiry presented an opportunity to address the issue: ‘Will it come into your report at all? It sure needs something’, she urged.89 Biles went on to become active in gay and lesbian politics, including serving as the Australian Union of Students’ Homosexual Research Officer in 1977. That year the report of the Royal Commission on Human Relationships endorsed the acknowledgement of homosexuality in school sex education programs, noting that courses ‘should be factual and balanced not condemnatory or judgmental’.90 Crucially, the issue of how homosexuality was addressed as part of sex education in schools was interconnected with the rights of gay and lesbian teachers. Through this period, the idea that homosexual teachers represented a threat to children was encapsulated in a number of highprofile dismissal cases. In early 1974, Macquarie University student Penny Short lost her teacher’s scholarship after publishing a lesbian poem in the student newspaper Arena the previous year.91 A number of cases followed, including that of CAMP member Michael Clohesy in Sydney, who was sacked following a television interview given about the group’s submission to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships in 1975, and that of Greg Weir in Brisbane, a trainee teacher who was refused employment by the state education department in 1977 because of his involvement in a gay student support group.92 These cases prompted more concerted action by lesbian feminist teachers to organise around their own employment rights and the rights of

gay and lesbian students. As well as lobbying education departments, this included a range of efforts to directly intervene in the classroom. In the context of these wider events, coming out at school was a powerful political act, providing a role model for students. In Sydney, Robyn Plaister—who later formed the Lesbian Teachers Group in 1978 with several friends— recalled having helped several senior students who had been having difficulties at the private girls’ school where she was a teacher. By the time she left at the end of 1977, she had come out fairly publicly: ‘I had a car which had stickers all over it, I spoke on radio, kids were aware that I was a dyke and the other teachers would have been.’93 Meanwhile, in Melbourne, feminists were called on to support the Gay Teachers and Students Group’s efforts to disseminate its publication Young, Gay and Proud (1978). The handbook provided explicit sexual instruction, as well as legal advice and sexual health information.94 It was subject to intense opposition by conservative groups, whose complaints prompted the Education Minister and Director-General of Education to issue a joint directive to school principals in March 1979 to ‘ensure that copies of books seeking to foster homosexual behaviour are not available to children with[in] the school library’.95 The minister’s direction was, the group declared, ‘an act of censorship which hits those least able to fight it—young people and especially young homosexuals’.96 Nevertheless, the group still managed to distribute all 10 000 copies.97 The concerted campaign against Young, Gay and Proud was indicative of the increasing traction of conservative groups, such as the Christianbased Festival of Light (FoL), in the late 1970s. Other targets of FoL and likeminded organisations ranged from a sex education film series, Growing Up (1977), to the social science studies courses Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) and Social Education Materials Project (SEMP), which the Queensland government banned in 1978.98 The latter were not sex education programs per se, but were seen as promoting secular values and undermining the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family unit. FoL viewed these school initiatives as symbolic of the rise of the ‘sexually permissive’ society and as an affront to parents’ rights; sex education should be the prerogative of parents rather than the state, the group argued.99 These groups likewise opposed making contraception and abortion available to teenage girls on the

basis that it would encourage promiscuous behaviour and pre-marital sex. Accordingly, they would also put up significant resistance to feminist attempts to extend their reproductive rights agenda to teenage girls.

Teenage Pregnancy and the ‘Right to Choose’ The pregnant teenage body is fundamentally a sexed body. As feminist historian Gail Reekie has argued, it bears ‘the blatant testimony of its capacity to transgress sexual and parental norms’.100 Reekie makes this assertion writing about the early decades of the twentieth century, but the anxiety generated by teenage pregnancy was still very much evident in the 1970s. Although rates of teenage pregnancy began to fall after a historic high in 1971, the issue continued to generate significant concern. The introduction of the supporting mother’s benefit in 1973 in particular prompted a new discourse of social disadvantage and welfare dependency: teenage mothers were increasingly portrayed as an ‘at risk’ group and burden on the state.101 Feminists arguably contributed to this discourse, emphasising the negative effects of teenage pregnancy on girls’ education and employment prospects, especially for working-class girls. At the same time, they challenged the equation of teenage pregnancy with sexual irresponsibility and instead insisted on girls’ equal ‘right to choose’, validating their sexual agency in a number of important ways. First and foremost, women’s liberationists sought to ensure that girls could access contraception, especially the pill. Australia was one of the early adopters of the pill, releasing it in January 1961, but access remained uneven for many years. Unmarried women continued to report issues obtaining the pill well into the early 1970s, and the barriers were even more onerous for teenage girls.102 For example, a study of general practitioners published in the Medical Journal of Australia in May 1972 found that only two of nineteen doctors would prescribe the pill to an unmarried minor without parental consent.103 Nor was it only general practitioners who appeared to be unwilling to grant access to the pill to underage girls, but family planning and hospital clinics, too. The 1971 pamphlet What Every Girl Should Know About Contraception included an advertisement for the local family planning clinic in Adelaide, but with the proviso that, if under the age of seventeen, the service ‘cannot legally treat you’.104 Six years

later, the Royal Commission on Human Relationships reported some improvements, but the situation varied across states. For example, hospitals and abortion clinics in New South Wales and Victoria gave contraceptive advice and supplies to girls under the age of sixteen ‘as needed’, and family planning clinics in Western Australia had a specific policy of not giving information to parents. By contrast, family planning clinics in the Australian Capital Territory continued to require parental consent.105 A central reason for doctors’ hesitance was a fear that, under age-ofconsent laws, doctors would be considered liable for aiding and abetting carnal knowledge if they facilitated underage girls’ access to contraception. Indicative of the level of professional concern generated by the issue, the editors of the Medical Journal of Australia warned in September 1973 that the ‘law urgently needs clarification’.106 The issue was also raised at the Women’s Health in a Changing Society conference in 1975, where Western Australian abortion reform activists Denise White and Henry Newmeyer moved a motion that the conference ‘deplores the existence of “age of consent laws”… as being harmful to young women in Australia, in that they are used to restrict access of young women to contraceptives and sexual information’.107 Notably, age-of-consent laws had once been considered a major achievement of feminists, who had argued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that they were necessary to protect young girls from male sexual licence.108 Now age-of-consent laws were reconfigured as a key impediment to girls’ sexual freedom. The legal uncertainties resulting from age-of-consent laws were even more pronounced when it came to teenage girls’ access to abortion. Abortion was legal in most states and territories, at least under some circumstances, by the second half of the 1970s.109 But doctors often made parental approval a requirement and imposed stricter criteria on teenage girls out of a concern for their own legal liability. Once again, the situation varied from state to state. For example, clinics in Victoria were reported to require parental consent or psychiatric referral for those under sixteen, while those in New South Wales required parental consent if the patient was under the age of fourteen.110 The additional obstacles faced by teenage girls were a source of ongoing concern for women’s liberationists and other abortion rights activists. At the National Conference on Abortion and

Contraception, held in Sydney in June 1975, the Melbourne Women’s Health Collective noted that whereas women were typically able to obtain an abortion with a general practitioner’s recommendation, teenage girls were ‘automatically’ sent to psychiatrists. ‘Recently we had a fifteen-yearold refused point-blank because she stated quite openly to the operator that she had no psychological complaints’, they told the conference. The ‘offensive’ situation was, they noted, illustrative of ‘the hypocrisy of the state of abortion where the male operator stands in judgement over the women’.111 While such practices frustrated women’s liberationists, doctors’ reticence to provide abortions to teenage girls was not without some justification. Later that year, the legal risks were underlined in a pivotal case involving two workers at the Liverpool Women’s Health Centre in Sydney. The centre, based in a predominantly working-class area, had opened in March 1975 and offered a free abortion service once a week. On 30 October 1975, the centre’s doctor was charged with illegally performing an abortion on a fifteen-year-old girl and, on 3 November 1975, a nurse was charged with aiding and abetting. The arrests followed a report to the police by the girl’s parents, who objected that they had not given permission for the abortion.112 The case alarmed activists, who organised a high-profile campaign to raise funds for the legal defence of the two workers. The committal hearing took place on 22 and 23 March 1976, and coincided with parliamentary debate over a private member’s bill seeking to limit abortion to cases necessary to prevent the death of or ‘irreparable damage’ to the mother. While the bill lapsed after its second reading, activists were on high alert, noting that it was possible a compromise bill might be introduced.113 Women’s liberationists worried that the Liverpool case could precipitate new restrictions on access to abortion. Of more immediate concern, however, was the treatment of the teenage girl concerned. The legal defence focused on the rights of minors aged fourteen and over to consent to medical treatment on a confidential basis, as stipulated under the Minors (Property and Contracts) Act 1970 (NSW).114 Meanwhile, feminist reporting on the case drew attention to the girl’s family circumstances. An article in the Sydney feminist newspaper Mabel noted that the teenage girl had sought an abortion because she had been ‘frightened’ that her parents

would lay a charge of carnal knowledge against her boyfriend. Furthermore, she was now estranged from her parents, having run away from home and been placed in a child welfare institution.115

Figure 5: International Women’s Day march, Sydney, 5 March 1976. Photographer: Keith Byron, Sydney Morning Herald. Ultimately, the case was brought to an end through political intervention. After the election of a new Labor Wran government in May 1976, the defence applied for a ‘no bill’, asking the Attorney-General Frank Walker to exercise his power to determine whether they should go to trial. To their relief, the no bill was granted in December 1976.116 But while Walker’s intervention ensured that the prosecution of the Liverpool Women’s Health Centre workers did not proceed, it also left the legal ambiguities surrounding teenage girls’ access to abortion unresolved. A year later, the Royal Commission on Human Relationships found that the NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association still recommended

consulting parents where a patient was under the age of sixteen years, even in cases where the girl requested them not to do so.117 The commission’s recommendation that abortion be made available to girls over the age of fourteen quickly became the subject of sensationalist media reports when sections of the report were released ahead of the December 1977 election. As historian Michelle Arrow notes, the selective leaking of the commission’s ‘most incendiary recommendations’ was intended to discredit the Labor Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam, who had set up the commission in 1974.118 The recommendation about abortion was also seized upon by the Festival of Light as part of its campaign against the ‘irresponsible recommendations’ of the report, which it made a key target of its activities in the lead up to International Year of the Child in 1979 (see Chapter 5 and Afterword).119 Restrictions on minors’ access to abortion continued to be a cause of concern for abortion rights activists in Australia in later decades.120 While improved access to abortion is often celebrated as one of women’s liberation’s key achievements, it has also come to be seen as representative of the movement’s tendency to privilege the experiences of white women.121 Notably, the campaign in defence of the Liverpool Women’s Health Centre workers coincided with deliberations within the Women’s Abortion Action Campaign (WAAC), one of the key groups involved, over how it might address Indigenous women’s concerns about forced abortion and sterilisation procedures. The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen a range of medical experts and government officials advocate family planning programs as a solution to the high rate of Aboriginal infant mortality, particularly in the Northern Territory.122 Indigenous activists in turn challenged such policies as a form of white control and a continuation of historic practices of genocide, citing instances of women and girls being coerced to terminate pregnancies and sterilised without their consent, including in evidence given to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.123 In this context, some Indigenous women also voiced reservations about the feminist focus on abortion, noting that the very legal barriers to accessing abortion that white women’s liberationists identified as oppressive arguably served to protect Indigenous women and girls from

further abuse. Roberta (Bobbi) Skyes, who was active in the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern and a founder of the Black Women’s Action Group in 1973, later recalled their fears that ‘under more relaxed legislation there would virtually be open hunting season’.124 Not all Indigenous women necessarily opposed abortion law reform; for example, when Pat Eatock ran as an independent candidate in the 1972 federal election— supported amongst others by Canberra Women’s Liberation—her platform included the repeal of abortion laws.125 Nonetheless, the critique powerfully demonstrated the dangers of white activists presuming to speak on behalf of Indigenous women. The response of WAAC in turn reflected the fraught nature of the subject. The issue of forced sterilisation was first flagged in WAAC’s national journal Right to Choose in 1974 by Melbourne doctor Janet Bacon. Citing the high rate of tubal ligation operations performed on Indigenous women, she expressed sympathy for the view that ‘a policy of genocide is being practised by some doctors in Australia’. In the same article, Bacon suggested that access to contraception was also being denied to Indigenous women and teenagers, noting the case of a seventeen-year-old girl ‘still at school’ who had requested the pill from a country doctor, only to be ‘lectured on the loose morals of aboriginal [sic] women’.126 However, it was another year before the issue of forced sterilisation was addressed substantively by WAAC, after it was flagged by Indigenous activists as a key concern at the Women and Politics Conference in Canberra in September 1975, including in a set of demands issued to conference delegates.127 Two months later—and just after the Liverpool Women’s Health Centre workers were arrested—WAAC reported that it had since learned more about the situation in the Northern Territory, including at least one case of a nurse who ‘proudly admitted’ to ‘having all the older women sterilised and teenagers fitted with IUD’s [sic] without their knowledge or consent’ to reduce infant mortality rates.128 While WAAC strongly condemned such actions, its campaign response in many ways reinforced the view that women’s liberation was unreceptive to Indigenous women’s concerns. In Right to Choose, WAAC announced that the organisation had decided to make ‘no forced sterilization’ one of its core demands.129 However, it rejected the view that campaigning for

abortion was itself detrimental to the interests of Indigenous women and girls, maintaining that abortion ‘cannot be used as a weapon of racism if the campaign concentrates on the feminist nature of the demand’.130 Furthermore, while the issue of forced sterilisation was referenced in its subsequent campaign materials, the focus of WAAC’s work in the coming years remained heavily weighted towards the issue of legal abortion. Feminists’ tendency to prioritise the issues of contraception and abortion not only resulted in an inadequate response to the concerns raised by Indigenous activists about forced sterilisation and abortion. It also meant that less attention was given to the rights of pregnant girls and teenage mothers. However, this issue would also gradually find its way into the feminist agenda. Some of the most compelling advocacy on this subject came from high school girls concerned about discrimination against pregnant students. The first public appearance of the Secondary Students Group in Melbourne was at a protest organised by the Women’s Abortion Action Coalition on 11 May 1974, ahead of a large rally the following day by the Right to Life Association.131 The group’s representative, Elizabeth Wheelahan, used the opportunity to raise the issue of the expulsion of pregnant teenagers from schools, as well as the lack of contraceptive advice available to them. Wheelahan demanded ‘an immediate end to this double standard’.132 The rights of pregnant students were also a focus of the Brisbane High School Feminist Group. In a paper they presented at the Sexism and Schooling Conference in Adelaide in 1976, the group noted the irony of being required to learn mothercraft in grade nine while actual pregnancy ‘is a disastrous end for the female student’. More often than not, ‘our educators, who are actively engaged in advocating “the joys of motherhood”, prefer to guiltily remove the pregnant girl’, the group noted, and she ‘will probably never be able to return to continue her education’. The group highlighted the sexual double standard that saw girls deemed ‘sluts’ in such instances, while male students were if anything ‘elevated’ in their status and able to ‘boast’ to their peers of their ‘exploits’.133 Feminist teachers also expressed support for the rights of pregnant students. The Women in Education Group in Sydney, for example, included a provision on the need to respect the wishes of pregnant girls in its

statement of aims, issued in 1975.134 Later that year, the Girls, School and Society report called for better support for teenage mothers in schools. It, too, alluded to the sexual double standard, emphasising ‘the fact that no such pressures [to leave school] are brought to bear on the fathers of the children concerned’.135 In some cases, feminist teachers found themselves in the position of directly assisting teenage mothers. In an article on counter-sexist strategies in school counselling, published in the Radical Education Dossier, Sydney activist Monika Allan suggested discussing the student’s feelings, exploring her options for returning to school and finding child care, and helping to build understanding for her decision within the wider school community. The key, Allan emphasised, was to provide ‘support … but not pressure’.136 The distinction between guiding teenage girls and making decisions on their behalf was a crucial one. At stake in feminist responses to teenage pregnancy were not only questions of stigma and the sexual double standard, but fundamental questions about adult control over teenage girls’ lives. As Allan’s comments indicate, even feminist educators might find themselves replicating this dynamic if they were not careful. Her insistence that they not ‘pressure’ girls, by contrast, demonstrated a firm commitment to acknowledging their agency, in this instance not just in sexual decisionmaking but in navigating its consequences. This principle was one that women’s liberationists continued to come back to across their manifold interventions into the domain of children’s sexuality during the 1970s. There was no easy resolution to some of the debates that emerged in this arena, not least of all the question of reproductive rights. Even so, women’s liberationists’ activities attest to their deep investment in the possibility of children’s sexual liberation. Some of these initiatives emphasised children’s own right to sexual expression more explicitly than others; yet together, they contributed to a process of challenging the control of parents, schools, doctors and other adult authorities over this domain. Feminists affirmed children’s sexual agency on multiple levels: by emphasising children’s own sexual awareness and knowledge; by challenging heterosexual norms and the sexual double standard; and by emphasising, above all, the importance of children’s bodily autonomy. That women’s liberationists continued to hold on to the

possibility of children’s sexual liberation through this period is all the more noteworthy given the difficult questions raised by the problem of sexual violence, one of the subjects explored in the next chapter.

Chapter 5 Exposing Abuse

On 10 March 1974, over 300 women gathered in Sydney to bear witness to personal testimonies of violence at the landmark Women Against the Violent Society forum. Held the day after the annual International Women’s Day (IWD) march, the event was modelled on the previous year’s Sydney Women’s Commission, at which participants had been called on to share their life experiences as part of ‘a new experiment’ in documenting ‘the oppression of women in Australia’.1 At the 1974 forum, many women spoke publicly for the first time about their experiences of violence, including domestic abuse and rape. ‘In sombre silence we listened as woman after woman stood up to tell her story’, Anne Summers later recalled. The cumulative impact of their testimony was overwhelming; the mood of the room was one of ‘palpable rage’.2 The 1974 forum has since been heralded as a major turning point in feminist activism around violence.3 It is perhaps best known as one of the catalysts for the establishment of Australia’s first feminist refuge, Elsie, which opened six days later—although much of the planning had already been undertaken by a small group of women, including Summers, in the preceding months.4 While the establishment of Elsie was certainly one of the forum’s most tangible outcomes, the broader discussions around violence and its causes generated by the event were equally important.

Notably, while the primary focus of the forum was on violence experienced by women, the organisers also nominated ‘violence against children’ as one of the main topics for the day’s discussion. The advertisement for the forum asked attendees, ‘Do you take out your frustrations on children? What causes battered babies? What happens to children at school? Have you, or your children, been sent to an institution?’5 Through events like the Sydney forum, women’s liberationists sought to challenge the prevailing silence around violence against women and children. While child abuse had begun to receive more attention in medical circles in the early 1960s, it took another decade for it be identified as an urgent social problem, and it was not until later in the 1970s and early 1980s that the extent of child sexual abuse was recognised.6 During this period, feminists played a critical role in expanding awareness of the problem and its causes, as well as highlighting other forms of violence against children. Activists in women’s refuges and rape crisis centres worked assiduously to expose children’s vulnerability to physical, emotional and sexual abuse, particularly within the confines of the family home, offering new analyses of both maternal and paternal violence. In addition, women’s liberationists joined forces with former residents to campaign against the mistreatment of children within welfare institutions. While feminist anti-violence activism in this period is often considered to be one of the signature achievements of the movement, these campaigns around children have received comparatively little consideration. Children comprised the majority of residents in women’s refuges, but so far their experiences have not been a focus of sustained analysis.7 Child sexual abuse is more widely recognised as a focus of feminist activism in this period, but feminist contributions to child welfare campaigns remain less well documented, despite the increased public scrutiny that these institutions have come under in recent years.8 Moreover, the full extent of feminist activism across these areas and the links between them have yet to be closely explored. As this chapter reveals, violence against women and violence against children were understood to be closely intertwined with one another—and the responses advocated by activists, including an emphasis on empowering victims to speak out about their experiences and enact changes in their own

lives, ran in parallel with one another. At the same time, the problem of violence against children presented unique challenges and, in some cases, forced activists to consider whether more interventionist responses were called for. This chapter revisits feminists’ efforts to raise awareness of violence against children and explores how their increasing focus on abuse both reaffirmed and complicated the agenda of children’s liberation.

The Battered Child Child abuse had already become a greater focus of public attention in Australia when women’s liberationists began to address the subject. While campaigners against child cruelty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had also taken up the issue of child abuse, a new wave of concern emerged in the mid-1960s, prompted initially by the work of medical practitioners. In 1962, American paediatrician Henry Kempe published his influential study of ‘battered child syndrome’ in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Kempe’s work was a response to the findings of radiologists of unexplained bone fractures in young children and focused on instances of physical abuse in cases of young children, identifying the syndrome as a clinical condition most often affecting those under the age of three.9 Kempe and his co-authors suggested that ‘psychiatric factors’ played a key role in the abuse. They concluded that while abusive parents ‘do not necessarily have psychopathic or sociopathic personalities’, they typically displayed ‘some defect in character structure … often parents may be repeating the type of child care practised on them in their childhood’.10 Kempe’s findings quickly gained international attention within the medical profession, including in Australia, where his work influenced a series of studies of child abuse published just a few years later.11 Soon the subject of child abuse was gaining the attention not just of doctors and social workers, but also the media and policymakers. South Australia became the first state to introduce mandatory reporting laws in 1969, requiring doctors and dentists to report any cases where they had reasonable suspicions of harm to a child. Tasmania followed in 1974and extended the requirement to a wider range of professionals.12 In August 1975, the first national conference on child abuse was held in Perth, with

Kempe giving the keynote address.13 Since the publication of his original research, Kempe had gone on to establish the National Centre for the Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect in Denver, Colorado, where abusive parents were offered counselling and other support services. Kempe’s visit was widely reported in the Australian media. He was lauded for his role in developing new treatments for abuse in which ‘the remorseful abuser and the child alike were regarded as victims’.14 Among the Perth conference attendees was Anne Deveson, one of the three commissioners appointed by the Whitlam government in 1974 to oversee the Royal Commission on Human Relationships. Historian Michelle Arrow has recently highlighted the important role that the royal commission played in raising public awareness of child abuse after it heard from parents who admitted to having harmed their children or feared doing so.15 Its investigations led it to emphasise a range of social factors that made children vulnerable to abuse, especially by their mothers. Women were more prone to physically abusing their children, its final report suggested, due to the pressures of social isolation and lack of support services for mothers, with unwanted pregnancy also identified as a precipitating factor.16 The welfare of children and mothers was thus closely entwined; to prevent child abuse, it was first necessary to ensure mothers were well supported. These findings echoed the analyses of child abuse put forward by feminists in the preceding years. The problem of child abuse initially entered feminist discourse as part of what North American historian Ann Snitow has described as the process of breaking ‘taboos’ around motherhood, including its ‘pain, isolation, boredom, murderousness’— qualities that were understood to be bound up with the pressures of childrearing in the context of the nuclear family in particular.17 Indeed, when Kempe’s findings were first released in 1962, they caught the attention of Betty Friedan, who was writing The Feminine Mystique at the time. Published the following year, the book cited a news article on Kempe’s study and linked the phenomenon of the ‘battered child’ to the wider problem of white, middle-class women’s isolation in the home. Child battering, Friedan suggested, was the product of ‘the rage the wives did not dare to use against their husbands’.18

Her interpretation of child abuse was reaffirmed in early women’s liberation writings. In an essay included in the anthology Notes from the Second Year (1970), New York radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson raised the subject of child abuse in order to query the notion of an inherent ‘maternal instinct’, noting that ‘parents (and we all know who that is) are the second highest cause of children’s deaths (“accidents” rank first)’.19 Germaine Greer personally attested to this potential for harm, presenting herself as a victim of an abusive mother. According to Greer, her mother would punish Greer and her siblings as a means of getting at their father, including, in one instance, physically beating Greer’s three-year-old brother (see the previous discussion of their relationship in Chapter 2).20 This view of child abuse as one of the silent taboos of motherhood resonated with Australian women’s liberationists as the movement began to focus on issues of violence in a more concerted way from the mid-1970s onwards. Women’s reticence to broach the subject was reflected at the Women Against the Violent Society forum in 1974, with the organisers noting in a report on the event that maternal violence had been one of the ‘hardest experiences’ to talk about even though a significant degree of ‘trust’ was established.21 A week prior to the central event, participants at a one-day ‘mini-commission’ on ‘women in suburbia’, held in Epping in north-west Sydney, had also grappled with the subject, which they framed as part of a broader discussion of the ‘myth of motherhood’. Attendees noted: Raising children is called to be a lifelong duty, a fulfilment of a woman’s ‘natural’ (biological) and ‘purposeful’ (religious) need … [Yet] not all women are maternal beings. Children are abandoned and battered and killed by mothers, many of whom were forced into motherhood in one way or another.22 Canberra activist Pat offered yet another perspective on the subject. A discussion on ‘violence’ as part of International Women’s Day activities in Canberra that same month prompted Pat to query her own actions. ‘How many of us have struck others, especially kids, and guiltily excused ourselves by saying we lost our temper?’, she asked. Children were, she

indicated, implicitly blamed in such instances, whereas the real issue was adults’ own misuse of their power over children. But Pat was also wary of simply condemning mothers in such instances, for they were already held to a double standard. Society upheld parents’ ‘right of corporal punishment over their children’, while ‘if the mother under various psychological pressures loses the ability to differentiate between socially acceptable violence and socially unacceptable violence she is a child basher’.23 Indeed, the disproportionate moral focus on mothers was problematic on multiple levels. It not only produced shame and guilt, but also masked the impact of male violence on women and children, as refuge activists would soon make clear. While the ‘battered child’ had already entered feminist discourse before refuges were established, activists’ personal encounters with children in this setting would see them develop a more complex picture of child abuse, locating maternal violence in a wider context of domestic abuse and giving greater weight to paternal violence.

Refuges and Violence Against Children On 16 March 1974, a group of Sydney women’s liberationists broke into two unoccupied houses in the inner-west suburb of Glebe, painted the words ‘Women’s Refuge’ across the front walls and announced to the media that they were offering sanctuary to any woman who needed it. While it took three days for the first residents to arrive at the squatted houses, soon Elsie Women’s Refuge was ‘overflowing’ not only with women but children as well. Anne Summers, who was one of the instigators of the plan, would later recall that many of the children were ‘even more badly affected’ than their mothers; ‘most of them had some form of behaviour problem and some of them were themselves aggressive’. The collective—composed primarily of young, childless women like herself—had given some consideration to the issue of child care in their planning, but were nonetheless unprepared for the level of distress.24 This experience was repeated as activists set about establishing refuges in other parts of the country. The founding of Elsie precipitated a flurry of activity. Within a year, there were eleven women’s refuges that had opened or were in the process of opening and, in June 1975, national funding was secured from the Whitlam government following protracted negotiations

over departmental responsibility.25 Another twenty-two had been established by mid-1976. These refuges likewise found themselves having to accommodate significant numbers of children. Between March 1974 and June 1976, 6935 children stayed in women’s refuges across the country, comprising more than half the total number of residents and, in some cases, up to two-thirds.26 Importantly, the rapid expansion of refuges was not driven solely by women’s liberation activists. Feminist refuges were joined by those set up by church groups, local councils and charities, often operating along more traditional welfare lines. In addition, in Melbourne, the first migrant-run women’s refuge opened in 1975 in response to concerns that migrant women remained excluded from both feminist and traditional welfare services.27 Plans to establish a refuge for Indigenous women and their children in Melbourne were finally realised in 1979, when the Elizabeth Hoffman House opened under the auspices of the Aboriginal Advancement League. That same year, Cawarra Aboriginal Refuge also opened in Sydney.28 Among the key features that distinguished Elsie and other refuges established by women’s liberationists—particularly from those set up by church groups and traditional welfare organisations—were their adoption of collective decision-making structures and a focus on residential control.29 These features were not only consistent with feminist resistance to formal organisational structures, but were also considered especially necessary if refuges were to operate as a genuine alternative to the existing system of ‘paternalistic’ social welfare. From the outset, women’s liberationists emphasised that they saw their role as one of ‘empowering’ residents rather than making decisions on their behalf.30 Furthermore, feminist refuges were characterised by their focus on the nuclear family as the locus of women’s oppression. Indeed, one of their most significant interventions into public debate around domestic violence was to ‘recast’ the family as ‘a site that concealed oppression’.31 Equally, this focus on violence in the setting of the nuclear family also contributed to perceptions of feminist refuges as primarily catering to the needs of white women, a view further reinforced by persistent concerns about racism within refuges raised by Indigenous women and migrant women during this

period.32 By contrast, racial violence and women’s experiences of institutionalisation—rather than violence in the home—emerged as the key concerns at Indigenous-run refuges.33 This focus on the nuclear family, already evident in early feminist analyses of the ‘battered child’, would likewise shape the explanations of children’s experiences of violence developed by feminist refuge activists. In the first instance, they sought to show how the ‘private’ institution of the family worked to silence children who were the victims of abuse. The same month that Elsie opened, an article on the Chiswick women’s shelter in London—founded by Erin Pizzey in 1971 and an important source of inspiration for Elsie—was reprinted in the Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter.34 It took readers inside the shelter and introduced some of the residents, including David, Fred and Sandra, who ‘are belted, too, by their Daddies’. Just as women suffered the ‘secret shame’ of domestic violence, their fathers’ abuse left children believing that they deserved their abuse. Thus, Sammy, with his ‘scarred back, given him by his Dad’, was left to see himself as ‘uniquely unloveable, revolting to his own father and therefore sub-human’, the author wrote.35

Figure 6: Elsie Women’s Refuge, Sydney, 1975. National Archives of Australia, NAA: A6180, 2/6/75/13. In a similar vein, Australian activists sought to expose the effects of male violence on children. At Elsie, a prime opportunity arose to bring the subject to the attention of policymakers when the refuge was commissioned to undertake the first qualitative study of domestic violence in Australia for the Royal Commission on Human Relationships. Prepared by Elsie counsellor Christina Gibbeson, the study not only reported on the experiences of women at the refuge but also their children. It found that 22 per cent of the children who had stayed in late 1975 and early 1976 had been attacked ‘constantly’ and a further 16 per cent ‘sporadically’. Furthermore, the majority of women ‘feared that their children would be attacked’.36 In addition to preparing the report for the commission, Gibbeson also gave evidence at a hearing in Sydney at which she commented on the distressed state of children at the refuge: It is really quite terrifying. Depending on their age—2-year-olds having nervous breakdowns is not uncommon, even being hospitalised, right up to 13- or 14-year-olds who cannot sleep, cannot eat, they are vomiting, calling to their mothers—they have terrible screaming tantrums.37 Nor was it only these immediate effects of violence that worried Gibbeson. She also observed that children ‘caught in the middle ofa violent relationship … often admire the bravado of the father who beats them up as well’.38 In the same way that children absorbed other aspects of conventional sex-role behaviour from their parents (see Chapter 3), she noted that children’s observations of their fathers’ violence had a powerful socialising effect. Activists in other parts of the country presented similar findings to government officials. In a letter to the Department of Health in June 1975, the sub-committee for the Shelta women’s refuge in Brisbane highlighted the distressed state of children at the refuge. A month after Shelta had opened in the inner suburb of Bowen Hills, the sub-committee could report

confidently on the success of the refuge’s model, which had enabled the women ‘to reorganise their lives in a very short space of time and move out of Shelta fairly quickly’. Yet it was less optimistic about the impact that the refuge had had on children, who presented ‘a much greater problem’. ‘Children in this situation are very often insecure and unsettled’, the letter noted, for many had ‘been witnesses to recurrent violence in the home— violence usually perpetrated by their father’.39 Like Gibbeson, the Shelta collective was concerned not just about the immediate physical and psychological effects of violence itself on children, but also about its socialising effect, particularly in reproducing gendered patterns of behaviour. In a funding submission the following year, the collective warned that children’s exposure to violence could lead to the ‘vicious perpetuation of family patterns’. ‘Many of the boys already showed the aggressive and violent tendencies of their fathers’ and ‘many of the girls were overly passive and lacked confidence and initiative, identifying with the role of the mothers’, the submission stated.40 These concerns contributed to one of the early dilemmas faced by refuges: whether to accept boys as residents. Policies for individual refuges are not well recorded for this period, but at least some refuges did impose age limits on accepting male children on the basis that older boys posed a potential threat to women and girls.41 For example, the Women’s Liberation Halfway House in Melbourne—which opened in September 1974—adopted a firm approach of excluding boys over the age of twelve in their April 1975 guidelines, noting that if women wanted to stay at the refuge, their sons ‘may be referred to outside accommodation’.42 However, such policies were not universally accepted, not least of all because they had the side effect of excluding some mothers from refuges. Furthermore, some activists felt that refuges could play a positive role in boys’ lives, including by providing them with alternative male role models, and worried that this would be jeopardised by policies excluding them. While activists agreed that it was crucial to alert government officials and the wider community to the impact of male violence on children, they approached the question of child abuse by mothers more cautiously. The subject was a sensitive one, but all refuges had ‘to face [it] at some time or other’, according to participants at a workshop on ‘Children as Residents’ at

the first National Women’s Refuge Conference, held in Melbourne in March 1978. The group emphasised the role that the mother’s personal circumstances played in such situations. ‘Usually this is the result of some emotional and financial stress that the Mother is going through, and a child is usually the target of his/her Mother’s frustrations’, the workshop concluded.43 Some refuge activists have subsequently reflected on this period as one in which the movement failed to sufficiently respond to instances of such abuse. For example, Michelle Kosky, part of the founding group of Nardine refuge in Perth, told historian and social policy researcher Suellen Murray that ‘I don’t think we dealt with the children well ... We didn’t understand that there are behaviours that are unacceptable between mothers and children. Often the mothers came very traumatised from the violence they’d experienced and perpetuated it’.44 Crucially, the issue was not an easy one for refuges to address, given their professed commitment to respecting residents’ autonomy. The complexity of the issue was reflected in discussions at the Women’s Liberation Halfway House in Melbourne. In February 1975, just five months after opening, members of the refuge collective took part in a seminar on ‘child maltreatment’ organised by the Department of Health.45 They also began to clarify their position on addressing child abuse in the refuge itself. Frank discussions on the subject were recorded at roster meetings in the following months, prompting deliberations on whether placing children into care could be justified in severe cases.46 One outcome was a paper on child abuse that was circulated in April 1975. Echoing earlier feminist analyses, the unnamed author emphasised that child abuse should be understood as a ‘social disease’. It was a result of a ‘lifetime’ of conditioning, which resulted in women lacking a sense of themselves as ‘good and worthwhile’ people. Women had children as a way to fulfil their ‘needs for security and achievement’, a situation sure to breed resentment, manifesting, in some cases, in child abuse.47 The solution was to work to ‘bring about the downfall of the veneration of motherhood, the emphasis on the nuclear family, and the helpless dependent position of women’.48 Later in the year, members of the Halfway House collective pushed this analysis further in a paper presented at the Women and Madness

Conference, held at the University of Melbourne in August 1975. Drawing on the experience of the women residents, the conference paper theorised child abuse as a product of the pressures of the ‘motherhood myth’ and examined the effects of domestic violence itself on women. Battered women’s mothering was compromised by men’s violence, the paper argued, which explained their own abusive behaviour towards their children. In such a situation, ‘women can afford to give little or no thought to their own abilities to cope with the enormous demands of motherhood’. Furthermore, the paper observed that threats of violence by women’s partners towards children were used to control women, starting during pregnancy itself. ‘Women live through their pregnancies full of fear that their babies may be deformed because of beatings’, the collective claimed, or were pressured into having abortions or giving up their children for adoption.49 In keeping with earlier feminist writings, these papers characterised child abuse as a symptom of women’s oppression, rather than a product of individual pathology. But these explanations of maternal violence did not in themselves resolve the question of whether refuge workers had an obligation to respond and, if so, in what way. The situation was further complicated by disagreements within the Halfway House collective as to what exactly constituted abuse, particularly when it came to the use of smacking, shouting and swearing. While it was not always explicitly set out in such terms, class was one factor at play in these discussions. As the collective noted at one meeting, there was a ‘huge gap’ between the life experiences of roster women and resident women, which made it ‘hard to talk about what we’re on about’.50 The issue was not one that could be easily resolved, and discussions continued into the following year, when a member of the Halfway House collective circulated another statement on the subject. The failure to intervene in cases of child abuse was hypocritical, the author proclaimed: ‘We idealistically say that we are trying to breakdown [sic] the nuclear family because it is an oppressive unit in our society and that children are individuals in their own right. Yet our treatment of the children puts lie to this whole idea’.51 Rather than deferring to mothers, the author was adamant that the concept of collective responsibility necessitated action on the part of the refuge.

As the discussions at the Halfway House illustrate, women’s liberationists’ views on child abuse evolved in the process of establishing and running refuges for women and their children, and as they became more attuned to the dynamics of domestic violence. There were multiple issues at stake in these deliberations: on the one hand, refuge activists’ professed commitment to residential control, reinforced by an awareness of their own class privilege; on the other, refuge activists’ ideological opposition to the nuclear family, which not only informed their explanations of both men’s and women’s violence towards their children but, in the view of some refuge workers, trumped considerations of residential control. While the issue of child abuse was clearly a fraught one for feminist refuge activists, the discussions it generated also served to underline children’s needs more generally within the refuge setting. Indeed, one of the effects of these discussions was to reaffirm the importance of addressing children’s experiences of violence in their own right. Along with the practical imperatives of managing their presence, this attention to children as a group distinct from their mothers would prompt activists to reflect on their rights within the refuge setting and how refuges might contribute towards enhancing children’s political and social status.

Children’s Rights in Refuges In July 1975, just over a year after Elsie had opened, members of the collective met with their counterparts at the Halfway House in Melbourne to compare their experiences of running refuges. The agenda for the weekend-long gathering was packed. Suggested topics included their aims and policies, government funding, collective structures and communication between refuges, as well as the situation of child residents. Specifically, they needed to clarify who had ‘responsibility’ for children, what ‘rights’ they had and what ‘effect’ refuges had on them.52 Activists at Elsie and Halfway House were not alone in invoking the concept of children’s rights in their deliberations. A statement of aims issued by Shelta, most likely in 1976, included a provision recognising ‘that children also are oppressed’ and affirming its commitment to ‘work towards their liberation’.53 Other refuges invoked children’s rights in more generic terms, incorporating references to children alongside women in their policy

statements and other documents.54 While the approach of individual refuges varied, these early discussions signalled a growing consensus that children represented a distinct constituency within refuges, with their own needs and interests. Accordingly, and despite significant constraints on resources, considerable energy went into adapting refuges to children’s needs. Refuge activists directed their attention to multiple aspects of children’s wellbeing. They organised outreach services through local children’s hospitals and infant health clinics, helped women to navigate issues relating to their children’s schooling, and prioritised budgeting for toys, books, nappies, children’s clothes and other supplies.55 In addition, refuges sought donations of children’s items from the public and found that their appeals were well received. For example, after an article about the opening of the Halfway House was published in The Age, the refuge received multiple calls regarding donations, including from a woman who rang to donate children’s clothes and books, and an op shop in the eastern suburb of Glen Iris that was closing down and offered them baby clothes and bassinets.56 The provision of space for children in refuges was also given considerable attention. Some refuges, such as Hobart Women’s Shelter, assigned separate playrooms or children’s rooms.57 Others experimented with setting up new spaces for children. In the summer of 1976–1977, Elsie workers renovated a nearby house and opened it up to children both at the refuge and in the local neighbourhood. By August 1977, an estimated 150 children had used the new ‘kids’ annex’.58 The collective held high ambitions for the space. They hoped that it would ‘provide a centre of political change for kids’, enabling them ‘to find out who they are, to work out their own political demands as a group and find their own ways of pushing for change for kids’.59 The most pressing issue identified by refuges was to devise systems for child care within refuges. Many relied on volunteers to look after children at the refuge or take them on outings, including, in some cases, weekend getaways and holiday camps. Some also succeeded in gaining funding to employ dedicated child-care workers. At Shelta, for example, child-care workers were employed within months of the refuge opening. The collective made the case for funding by emphasising not only the practical necessity of child care, but its therapeutic benefit, explaining in a

submission to the Department of Health in June 1975 that it anticipated ‘concentrating a lot of energy on the stabilisation of the children’. In a notable departure from the prevailing emphasis on refuges as women-only spaces, the group also decided to appoint two men in the child-care role, on the basis that having ‘a caring male on the staff would redress some of the damage incurred in the destructive home situation’.60 Shelta was not the only refuge to come to this conclusion. At Elsie, the collective remained firmly committed to keeping the refuge as a women-run venture, but agreed to involve men in the separate kids’ annex in the hope that it would help boys ‘unlearn macho behaviour’.61 Nardine women’s refuge in Perth struck a different compromise: a homosexual male childcare worker was employed in the late 1970s and a group of male university students took children on weekend outings.62 However, other refuges remained firmly opposed to involving men, noting the importance of women learning to ‘do the work themselves’ and the risk of women ‘unconsciously’ deferring to men.63 Despite the early priority given to child care, it proved to be a difficult area in the coming years. Reliance on government funding meant that these positions were typically insecure and child-care provision across the refuge movement was inconsistent. For example, in 1978, only twelve out of twenty-six refuges in New South Wales had child-care workers.64 By the late 1970s, the status of child-care workers within refuges was also becoming a sore point. Child-care workers expressed disquiet over their pay and working hours; some also felt their role was ‘typecast’ and trivialised.65 Others extended this argument to suggest that the low status of child-care workers in refuges reflected a lack of value attributed to children themselves and a failure ‘to insist on the same level of social/political awareness from a child-care worker as from those working in other areas’.66 These concerns on the part of child-care workers formed the backdrop to calls in the late 1970s for a more considered response to children in refuges. A more concerted effort needed to be made to empower children within refuges, child-care workers argued; the core feminist principle of residential control ought to be applied to children as well. These concerns were laid out at the workshop on ‘Children and Refuges’ at the first National Women’s Refuges Conference, attended by representatives from

refuges in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Hobart and Perth. The group discussed children’s right to participate directly in the general running and decision-making processes of refuges, expressing support for ‘letting a child make its own decisions more often’ and ‘letting them attend more meetings, to talk about what they feel could be done for child-care’.67 Three months later, on 17 June 1978, Victorian activists organised a dedicated Children in Refuges Conference in Melbourne, the first of the kind in the country. Here they discussed a broad range of issues affecting children in refuges, including the effects of violence on children, school, nutrition, counselling and the need for follow-up work.68 Alongside these practical concerns, the questions of ‘HOW CAN WE BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE ALLIES’ and ‘CHILDREN’S RIGHTS’ were identified as key topics for discussion.69 One participant challenged refuge workers to consider how their own actions might undermine these principles and contribute to ‘adultism’ or the ‘systematic mistreatment of children by adults’, from ‘[s]creaming at children to keep out of the office because you’ve had a bad day’ to ‘[i]gnoring children entirely, or assuming anyone or any place is suitable for them, as long as they’re out of the way’. She encouraged refuge workers to organise ‘information/consciousness-raising’ sessions about ‘adultism’ and to ‘[i]nvite young people along to express their views’.70 Following the conference, Victorian activists gained the support of the Victorian Women’s Refuge Group (VWRG) to establish a new working group focused on the rights of children in refuges. The Child Care Working Group (later the Child Care Action Group) met regularly and served as a mechanism for ‘sharing skills and information between refuges’, while also campaigning for increased funding for refuges and children’s services in the community.71 One of the distinguishing features of its approach was an emphasis on children’s representation within the refuge movement. For example, a paper on ‘The Politics of Child Care’ presented at the state Victorian Women’s Refuges Conference in October 1979 emphasised the need for ‘structures within our refuges which allow for and encourage children to participate in the workings of the refuge’.72 Members would go one to articulate a more comprehensive vision for recognising children’s

participation, including advocating the organisation of separate children’s house meetings, alongside their participation in general meetings.73 The Victorian group sought to model this approach in their own activities. In the first edition of its newsletter, issued in September 1979, the group expressed its ‘hope’ that the publication would ‘give all of us (mothers, children, child care workers, etc.) the chance to communicate with each other’.74 To that end, it featured an article entitled ‘Two Kids Speak Out’, in which a girl and a boy reflected that they felt ‘safe’ and enjoyed playing at one refuge.75 Earlier, in May, members of the group had organised their own Kids’ Conference at the Universal Workshop in Fitzroy which they promoted as an alternative to what they considered to be the adult-centred program of official activities for International Year of the Child (IYC) sponsored by the government. The organising collective— which included three women and seven children, ranging in age from ten to sixteen—conceived of the event as an opportunity for children to express ‘what it’s like to be children, how they feel about school, parents, society, etc’.76 They proclaimed the conference a success, though some disappointment was noted on the part of the children in the planning committee who ‘had been spending weeks talking about things like kids’ rights [and] found out that other kids who came to the conference had not thought about them in quite the same way’. Even so, by the end of the conference, ‘it was obvious that lots of the kids had started to think about how they were treated by adults, and to express their views about it’.77 The Victorian group was especially determined to extend the principles of empowerment and residential control to children, but it was certainly not alone in demonstrating a commitment to these ideals. For example, women’s refuges in New South Wales were also placing greater emphasis on consultation with children, if not direct representation. In 1978, they received a grant from the Office of Child Care to undertake a survey of child-care needs across the state. Along with child care, the final report canvassed a range of issues affecting children, including schooling, child abuse and health concerns. Importantly, it also broached the issue of racism, observing that the ‘almost total Anglo-Australian atmosphere’ presented a problem for migrant women and children, who were ‘often the target of racist attitudes’ from other residents, and called for additional funding,

including for dedicated migrant worker positions, to better support migrant women and children.78 The authors of the report also made a point of including interviews with two girls in their research. Although they represented only a small portion of the research conducted, the interviews still served to raise children’s perspectives. Jane, aged twelve, for example, expressed a desire for ‘more things here to read and do’, noting that some other children were ‘real well off’ in comparison, while fifteen-year-old Tammie suggested that teenagers needed their own space and opportunities to go out.79 As suggested by Jane’s comment, children were themselves sensitive to disparities within the refuge setting—and not only those arising between children and adults, but amongst children themselves. On one level, these efforts to extend the principles of empowerment and residential control to children could be seen as relatively tokenistic. Yet cumulatively, they helped to make refuge activists more attuned to children’s needs and willing to reflect on their own positions of power. As one of the women who helped organise the Kids’ Conference noted afterwards, ‘as an adult, it was disconcerting to realise all the situations in which we are unfair to children without even thinking about it’.80 Most importantly, these efforts to recognise children’s rights within the refuge context helped to create an environment in which children’s accounts of violence were taken more seriously and acted upon.

The ‘Rediscovery’ of Child Sexual Abuse In 1978, Biff Ward first came across the phenomenon of ‘Father-Daughter Rape’. The problem was of such ‘epic proportions’, she wrote, that ‘it could only be named by the capitalised form’.81 Ward’s awareness of the issue was first raised while visiting the United States that year, where she made contact with a group of psychologists who worked at an incest clinic. After returning to Australia, Ward took up a position at the Canberra Women’s Refuge. She soon realised that many of the women and child residents were or had been victims of sexual violence.82 For Ward, the experience was transformative. Prompted by her work there, she went on to write one of the first detailed analyses of the subject, Father-Daughter Rape (1984), focusing on the abuse of girls by their fathers and other male relatives. The

book highlighted the pervasive social silence around sexual abuse and the reaction of disbelief with which victims were forced to contend: Until recently, the victims, if they ‘told’, were mostly disbelieved, ignored, declared ‘sick’; nowadays, they will most probably be questioned, doubted, cross-examined, psychiatrically examined, medically examined, and perhaps ‘helped’ by a bewildering array of therapies.83 Ward’s concerns were widely shared by her feminist contemporaries. Over the course of the preceding decade, Australian activists had become increasingly critical of the mainstream accounts of child abuse for failing to consider sexual violence. While more attention had been paid to the physical forms of abuse since Kempe coined the term ‘battered child syndrome’, the subject of child sexual abuse—particularly in the context of the family, the focus of Ward’s work—was yet to attract the same degree of public concern, even where prosecutions occurred.84 In the 1970s it became de rigueur to blame Freud for this silence. In his paper ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), Freud controversially argued that female hysteria and neurosis originated from repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.85 Just two years later, however, he began to express doubts about his so-called ‘seduction theory’ and ultimately went on to retract this thesis, paving the way for his work on infantile sexuality.86 In doing so, he was widely understood by feminists in the 1970s to have betrayed his patients by reducing memories of abuse to a form of ‘fantasy’.87 It was a view expressed by Nancy Rehfeldt, founding member of the Western Australian branch of Australian Women Against Rape (AWAR) and, later, of the Incest Survivors’ Association of Western Australia (now the Phoenix Support and Advocacy Service). ‘Children haven’t been believed, and a very unsympathetic approach to women of all ages is given. We have Freud to thank for this’, she stated in an interview published in the Perth feminist journal Sibyl in 1979.88 In taking up the issue of child sexual abuse, activists such as Ward and Rehfeldt saw themselves as engaged in an act of exposing a hidden problem in society. While subsequent scholarship has complicated a straightforward

narrative of ‘rediscovery’, there is little doubt that feminists played a key role in shaping the modern paradigm of child sexual abuse, particularly through a focus on sexual coercion in the context of the patriarchal family.89 These efforts began in the early 1970s and gathered force over the course of the decade as activists sought to bring the issue to public attention. North American feminist Florence Rush is credited with first identifying child sexual abuse as a concern for women’s liberation. On 17 April 1971, Rush gave a paper at a speak-out on rape organised by the New York Radical Feminists, in which she drew on her experience as a social worker in child welfare homes in New York. Rush identified the sexual abuse of children as a widespread phenomenon that was ‘overwhelmingly’ perpetrated by male adults against girls. Moreover, she argued, child sexual abuse was not taken seriously, as it served a social function of ‘socializing and preparing the female to accept a subordinate role’, thereby facilitating male sexual access to women.90 Her paper firmly framed the issue in terms of one of patriarchal control. One of the earliest investigations of child sexual abuse covered in the Australian feminist press similarly appeared in the context of feminist activism around the treatment of girls in institutional settings. In March 1973, Mejane published an article by collective member Suzanne Bellamytitled ‘Child Rape’, offering an analysis that closely echoed that of Rush.91 It formed part of the newspaper’s ongoing coverage of the Sydney movement’s high-profile campaign against the state child welfare department, in which issues of sexual violence were addressed alongside broader allegations of children’s mistreatment in institutional settings. The campaign was inspired by Glebe resident Bessie Guthrie, who had first begun researching state homes and the children’s court system in the 1950s and gone on to compile a substantial body of evidence highlighting the brutal conditions under which girls lived. She had since turned her home into a ‘safe house’ for runaway girls, including from the nearby Bidura Girls’ Home and Metropolitan Girls’ Shelter.92 In 1972, Guthrie joined the Mejane collective, who went on to publish a series of her files on girls’ cases. The newspaper called for a radical overhaul of the child welfare system and its replacement with ‘a cottage system in which, phase by

phase, the girls have freedom of movement and responsibility’, adding that the final goal must be ‘no more institutions of whatever benevolent sort’.93 The Sydney campaign to reform child welfare institutions was well underway by the time Bellamy reported on the subject of child rape in Mejane. Her article identified multiple categories of abuse. Through Guthrie’s files and her subsequent conversations with women, Bellamy explained that she had come to conclusion that sexual violence against girls within their own families was widespread. ‘[I]t seems obvious that a lot of female children have in fact been interfered with forcibly by their male fathers or male relatives’, she wrote. A single discussion with members of the Mejane collective, she reported, had generated nine cases of girls who had been ‘molested’ by male family members. Bellamy herself recalled the example of a primary school friend who had been forced to sleep with her father. Alongside these cases of familial abuse, Bellamy discussed the more widely recognised phenomenon of stranger danger: ‘that special category “the dirty old man”’, who was known to approach and molest ‘the very young’ in public places. Bellamy could also testify to this phenomenon, having on multiple occasions been ‘frozen’ helpless by encounters with such men on public transport as a child. Finally, Bellamy pointed to various forms of ‘sexual brutality’ that were inflicted within state homes themselves, referring to evidence of ‘“privileges” doled out [to girls] for the price of submission’ and ‘the occasional quiet dismissal of officers who go “a bit too far”’.94 In the months following the publication of Bellamy’s article, the Sydney campaign gathered further momentum. In July 1973, two male staff members resigned following allegations of abuse at Parramatta Girls Home, where one girl was reported to have received a broken jaw during a ‘disciplinary session’ and another head injuries while being ‘dealt with for misbehaving’.95 Later that month the ABC’s current affairs program, This Day Tonight, screened an exposé of conditions at the home, along with the Hay Institution for Girls; the program was produced by journalist Peter Manning, a fellow Glebe resident whom Guthrie had befriended.96 A subsequent protest organised by women’s liberation outside Parramatta Girls Home on 9 December 1973 garnered the support of a range of organisations, including the Women’s Electoral Lobby, the NSW Penal

Reform Council and the Council for Civil Liberties. The list of demands issued at the protest called for the ‘public exposure and arrest’ of the two employees and a guarantee of safety for any girls or others who testified against them.97 The list of demands also reflected feminists’ persistent emphasis on girls’ bodily autonomy and right to sexual expression. One of the most common reasons for girls being placed in welfare institutions was a finding of ‘exposure to moral danger’—a charge typically applied to girls alleged to be sexually active but under the age of consent, although also used in cases of sexual abuse. The institutionalisation of girls on the grounds of underage sex was considered by women’s liberationists to be a prime example of the policing of girls’ sexuality and the operation of the sexual double standard. Furthermore, activists deplored ‘humiliating’ practices implemented within the homes, such as virginity tests—which they argued represented a form of violence in itself—as well as prohibitions on lesbianism in the homes.98 ‘Sex education not sex punishment’, activists demanded at a subsequent protest at Bidura Girls’ Home on 9 March 1974, the day before the Women in the Violent Society forum was held in Sydney.99

Figure 7: Women’s liberation protest outside Parramatta Girls Home, 9 December 1973. Photographer: Martin Brannan, Sydney Morning Herald. .

Crucially, the campaign also foregrounded broader inequities in the operation of the child welfare system. A flyer circulated ahead of the protest at Bidura Girls’ Home observed that most of the children in welfare institutions were from low-income families; those who were more affluent could ‘escape being put into institutions; their parents or legal representatives usually satisfy courts that the children will undergo some other form of “treatment”’. It was thus a system designed to discipline working-class children: to produce ‘young people who are conformist, submissive (even ABJECT), who have “respect for Authority”’ and, in the case of girls in particular, to produce ‘domestic servants’ for husbands and employers—as reflected in their subjection to various forms of manual labour, including floor scrubbing.100 The overrepresentation of Indigenous children in welfare institutions was also alluded to in a range of campaign materials, although the systemic reasons for this disparity were not generally addressed. For example, ahead of the December 1973 protest at Parramatta Girls Home, it was noted that the system targeted ‘the underprivileged’ and that a ‘significant part of this group are Aboriginal children’, who not only suffered from the ‘oppressive’ nature of the institutional setting, but were also ‘deprived by a system totally lacking in any consideration for their traditions and culture’.101 The Sydney campaign had some success, with several of the targeted homes eventually being shut down, including Parramatta Girls Home and Hay Institution for Girls, which both closed later in 1974.102 Meanwhile, activists in other cities had begun to pay closer attention to the conditions in children’s homes. For example, in 1974, the Melbourne women’s liberation journal Vashti’s Voice published an account by Sharon describing her experience of being placed at Winbirra Reception Centre—part of Winlaton, the main state institution for adolescent girls in Victoria—two years earlier, when she was sixteen years old. Sharon described the charge of ‘exposure to moral danger’ as ‘one of the sickest and most oppressive weapons used against women in this sexist society’.103 That year the

Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group (MWTG) also took up the subject in their show Documentary Theatre, which drew on personal accounts of former residents at Winlaton. MWTG member Suzanne Spunner noted that, unlike the group’s previous works which were ‘broadly humorous revuestyle’ shows, Documentary Theatre marked the beginning of a trend to plays ‘oriented around particular issues and seemingly more “serious”’. The group’s performances took place at the Pram Factory in Carlton, one of the city’s best-known alternative theatre venues.104 The issue also remained a concern for women’s liberationists in subsequent years. For example, in 1978, Brisbane activist Marg O’Donnell warned that girls at the Remand and Assessment Centre for Girls at Wilson Youth Hospital continued to be subjected to ‘degrading, depersonalising, and quite frightening’ procedures such as pelvic examinations. O’Donnell, then a recent social work graduate, had been involved in the campaign to shut down another girls’ detention centre, Karrala House, in 1971. She noted in hindsight that the closure was a ‘pyrrhic victory’, for much of the treatment of girls at Wilson Youth Hospital—now the focus of a new campaign, led by a group formed in 1977 called Justice for Juveniles— remained largely unchanged. O’Donnell again reiterated the concerns about the system of care and control orders punishing girls who challenged social expectations of female behaviour, ‘implicitly reinforc[ing] her status as a deviant woman and unautonomous child’. The question of rape and sexual exploitation should be addressed by dealing with the (male) offender, she emphasised, rather than policing girls’ sexuality.105 By the time O’Donnell issued her critique, the issue of child sexual abuse had gained a higher profile as rape became more salient to feminist activism generally. In 1974, several participants at the Women Against the Violent Society in Sydney had given ‘harrowing’ personal testimonies of rape.106 Later that year, the first formal rape crisis services in Australia were established. In Sydney, a collective of women had already been providing counselling services to rape victims on a voluntary basis for several years but were able to set up a funded service with paid staff after securing a grant from the Whitlam government. The Sydney Rape Crisis Centre opened on 28 October 1974 and initially operated as a twenty-fourhour telephone service out of Women’s Liberation House.107 Soon after,

services began to open in other capital cities, including in Melbourne later that year, Brisbane and Perth in 1975, and Adelaide and Canberra in 1976.108 They came together in March 1976 for their first national conference in Sydney, from which the organisation Australian Women Against Rape (AWAR) was formed.109 During this period, rape also became a stronger theoretical concern for the movement. The publication of North American radical feminist Susan Brownmiller’s influential history of rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975)—itself inspired by Rush’s talk on child sexual abuse at the 1971 New York speak-out—marked a key turning point.110 Brownmiller argued that rape was a mechanism of social control: rape is ‘a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’, she declared.111 She also emphasised its historical origins in the patriarchal view of women as property of their fathers and husbands, an argument she extended to children. Child sexual abuse was ‘rooted in the same patriarchal philosophy of sexual private property that shaped and determined historic male attitudes toward rape. For if woman was man’s original corporal property, then children were, and are, a wholly owned subsidiary’, she observed.112 By the time Brownmiller visited Australia in November 1976 for a ten-day tour, Against Our Will had already become a bestseller, with 650 000 copies sold in the United States.113 Her visit generated strong media coverage, as well as interest from local activists, some of whom had the opportunity to meet her in person.114 The growing focus on rape in feminist theory and activism helped to generate a greater awareness of the prevalence of child sexual abuse. Volunteers and workers in rape crisis services were quickly confronted by cases of child victims seeking counselling. The Sydney Rape Crisis Centre saw 429 clients between October 1974 and March 1977, of whom a significant portion were children: eighteen were twelve years old or younger and 120 were between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.115 They also received close to a thousand calls reporting child sexual abuse between October 1974 and June 1978.116 These cases, particularly those involving family members, proved to be some of the most difficult for those working in rape crisis services, who found they were often unable to provide adequate assistance. ‘It’s really hard to know what sort of advice you can

give to somebody in that situation, except to say try and get away, but if you’re 12 years old, you can’t get away’, the Women Against Rape group in Victoria explained.117 While service workers at times felt powerless to assist individual victims, they were well placed to document the problem of child sexual abuse and use their research to influence policymakers and public attitudes. In the late 1970s, rape crisis services conducted some of the first research on child sexual abuse in Australia. Over the weekend of 23–24 September 1978, the Western Australian branch of AWAR conducted a phone-in on unreported rape. They received 150 calls, 50 per cent of which came from callers reporting incest, and 20 per cent reporting sexual molestation of young children.118 The following year, the Sydney Rape Crisis Centre conducted a phone-in on child sexual abuse, which resulted in over 250 calls in one week.119 This early research paved the way for larger studies in the 1980s that brought greater public visibility to the issue, including a landmark survey by The Australian Women’s Weekly in which 3 per cent of the 30000 respondents reported having been victims of incest, with brothers (34 per cent) and fathers (31 per cent) identified as the main perpetrators.120 The early 1980s also saw the establishment of the first dedicated shelters and hotlines for child sexual abuse, and government task forces were set up in several states to investigate legal and other responses.121 Even before these dedicated services were established, feminists in a number of cities had begun to recognise the need for tailored support for teenage girls who were survivors of sexual abuse, including as part of wider efforts to address the issue of youth homelessness. On 12 May 1978, the Annie Kenney Young Women’s Refuge opened in Hobart, the first service of its kind in Australia. It initially operated under the auspices of the Hobart Women’s Shelter, before becoming a separate incorporated entity in 1981. The refuge articulated its goals in terms of a critique of society’s ‘negative’ view of adolescence and presented itself as the antithesis to the ‘authoritarian’ structures of state institutions; one of its guiding principles was to support teenage girls’ ‘right to self determination’. In the first six months of operating, thirty-three young women stayed at the refuge; eleven of the girls were wards of the state and nine had previously spent time at Weeroona Girls’ Training Centre in Latrobe.122 The refuge observed that

many of the residents had a history of sexual abuse and suggested that this experience influenced their subsequent relationships with men. ‘Young women who have experienced sexual exploitation during their early teens learn to use their sexuality in their desperate need for security. Few girls of this age group can see beyond a societal pressure to relate to, and depend on a man’, it reported.123 The Hobart activists were not alone in observing a gap in service provision for teenage girls. Brisbane activists opened the Young Women’s Refuge in November 1978.124 In Melbourne, a Young Women’s Refuge Collective was formed in 1979 with the aim of setting up a service for those aged thirteen to twenty, although it was not until 1986 that the group realised its plans to establish a dedicated refuge.125 The collective noted that sexual abuse in the family home was a common pathway into homelessness, and the placement of girls in state institutions only served to extend their victimisation. ‘It’s not possible to lock up adults unless they are guilty of a crime, but young women are locked up because they are victims of abuse’, it asserted.126 In many respects, the work of these groups can be seen as an extension of the movement’s earlier campaigns against child welfare institutions. Certainly, they were modelled on principles similar to those previously advocated by activists such as Guthrie. At Annie Kenney, for example, girls were encouraged to participate in the decision-making about how the refuge operated.127 But their approach also signalled some of the difficulties that the growing focus on sexual violence generated when it came to sustaining other liberationist ideals. Whereas previous campaigns also foregrounded the rights of girls to determine their own sexuality, girls’ experiences were increasingly presented solely through the lens of sexual violence in this period. This shift reflected a broader dilemma faced by feminists as they grappled with the problem of child sexual abuse: how to reconcile claims for children’s sexual liberation with their analysis of power relations in the context of abuse. Australian historian Steven Angelides has gone so far as to argue that the feminist analysis of child sexual abuse, in so far as it reinforced a discourse of powerlessness, took place ‘at the expense of a discourse of child sexuality’ and ultimately effected the ‘erasure’ of

children’s sexual agency.128 Yet, many feminists still retained a commitment to expanding children’s sexual freedoms, as we saw in the previous chapter. The dilemma was brought into sharp relief by the attempts of conservative groups to co-opt the issue of child sexual abuse for their own purposes. Feminists’ efforts to distinguish their approach to the subject from these groups in turn highlight one way in which questions of sexual vulnerability could be accommodated within a children’s liberation framework.

Sexual Abuse, the Right and Sexual Censorship While feminists invested significant energy in exposing child sexual abuse, especially in the context of the family, they were not the only ones with a stake in how the narrative of sexual violence was told in the 1970s. In the popular discourse of the period, paedophilia was increasingly equated with homosexuality—an equation reflected in public controversies over sex education and warnings about children being ‘converted’ to ‘homosexual lifestyles’, but also complicated by the emergence of gay male paedophile rights and support groups during this period, which seemed to reaffirm conservative claims of a connection between homosexuality and child ‘seduction’.129 Feminists were more cautious than some sections of gay liberation when it came to the question of intergenerational sex (see Chapter 4). Nonetheless they shared the latter’s concerns about conservative groups’ use of paedophilia claims to support homophobic ideology. The prominent Christian group, the Festival of Light (FoL), was one of the main instigators of this narrative. Established in 1973, FoL suggested an association between homosexuality and sexual predation in some of its earliest material. A prime example—a booklet titled ‘Sex Education, The School and Your Child’—was brought to the attention of readers of the Sydney feminist newspaper Mabel in the lead up to the 1975 federal election, in which FoL’s political arm—the Family Action Movement (FAM), established in 1974—ran multiple candidates, including Frieda Brown and Fred Nile in New South Wales. According to the author of the Mabel article, the booklet was being ‘pushed into schools relatively unimpeded’ and reflected FoL’s desire to see women return ‘to exclusively home-based heterosexual child-centred lives’. But it was the section on

homosexuality that the author found most concerning, including its assertions of homosexuals’ ‘predilection’ for ‘child partners’. As well as highlighting the homophobic agenda of FoL, Mabel framed the issue as an explicitly feminist one in so far as it involved the ‘blatant’ exploitation of mothers’ fears about their children, ‘the dirtiest and most powerful kind of manipulative propaganda’.130 FoL’s tactic of conflating homosexuality and paedophilia continued to come under scrutiny in the following years. The issue came to a head in the lead up to International Year of the Child (IYC) in 1979, as FoL mounted a concerted campaign against the rise of ‘sexual permissiveness’ and its detrimental effects on children.131 In the year prior, under the direction of Rev. Fred Nile, FoL organised a speaking tour by high-profile British ‘moral crusader’ Mary Whitehouse. Founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in 1965, Whitehouse had campaigned for tighter obscenity laws and broadcasting standards, legal controls on sex education on behalf of parents and restrictions on pornography.132 She was also one of the founders of the British Festival of Light, established in 1972, and had previously visited Australia in October 1973 to launch FoL in Australia.133 Whitehouse arrived in Sydney on 3 September 1978 and spent the next three weeks in Australia, speaking at a range of private functions and public rallies. ‘Child-care not child abuse’ was the slogan used to promote the tour. In this context, ‘child abuse’ was used to refer to a wide range of societal ills that FoL considered a threat to children: secular education, television, pornography, promiscuity, abortion, drugs, incest, homosexuality—which the promotional material explicitly linked to paedophilia—and prostitution.134 Women’s liberationists joined with gay and lesbian activists and other radicals to resist this conservative agenda. Months before Whitehouse had even arrived, they began planning their response. In Sydney, Whitehouse’s upcoming visit was protested by participants in the historic first Mardi Gras parade on 24 June 1978. Further demonstrations were organised in the immediate lead-up to and during Whitehouse’s visit, including in Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. In Canberra, around fifty protestors picketed her address to the Catholic Women’s League at Lakeside Hotel on 26 September.135 A pamphlet advertising the demonstration set

out their objections, denouncing the ‘hypocrisy’ of her stance on child abuse and the conflation of paedophilia with homosexuality, when ‘the incidence of child molestation by homosexuals is much lower than by heterosexuals’. FoL had sensationalised the subject and ‘reduced debate of the problem of child abuse to irrational and hysterical outpourings’, it asserted.136 Feminists reiterated their objections as FoL continued with this strategy during IYC. FoL’s major activity for the year, the International Total Child Care Conference, took place at Macquarie University in Sydney over the weekend of 29–30 September 1979 and featured a range of speakers on child abuse and sexual exploitation. Gay rights activists questioned the credibility of two invited speakers from the Los Angeles police department, noting that the department had a reputation for persecuting homosexuals.137 Meanwhile, a group of socialist women denounced FoL’s ‘ad hoc’ approach to the subject, which saw them focus on ‘stranger danger’ rather than considering ‘why the bulk of child abuse occurs where it does, precisely within the bounds of family relationships’.138 Their objections to the event echoed the concerns expressed earlier in the year in an article, ‘Keep It in the Family’, that appeared as part of a two-page spread on ‘IYC— International Year of the Con’ in the Sydney feminist newspaper Rouge. The article warned that child sexual abuse was ‘conspicuously missing’ from IYC discussions and if ‘mentioned at all, it is in the context of “stranger danger” … [when] in fact, more often than not, the child is abused by a member of their own family’. Challenging the stereotype of the mentally ‘sick’ stranger who ‘hangs around school yards’, the author insisted that it was the man who in other respects ‘seems “normal”, has a respectable job, a wife, and two kids’ who ‘was MOST likely to abuse— and get away with it’.139 The ramifications of the ‘rediscovery’ of child sexual abuse for the feminist project of children’s liberation were far from straightforward. Certainly, feminist efforts to expose child sexual abuse could be viewed as reinscribing the very notions of sexual vulnerability that their campaigns in other areas, such as sex education, had worked to challenge. Yet their efforts to expose child sexual abuse also reaffirmed one of the movement’s longstanding arguments for children’s liberation. The consistent message of

women’s liberationists, as they sought to distance themselves from groups such as FoL, was that child sexual abuse was not a social anomaly, but deeply embedded in the institution of the heterosexual nuclear family. Indeed, if addressing violence prompted women’s liberationists at times to query the limits of children’s liberation, it did not bring into question the overall importance of this broader project. If anything, their investigations of child abuse in its many forms only added to feminists’ resolve to challenge children’s subordinate status, including by modelling new forms of services that would enable children to speak out about their experiences of abuse. Furthermore, their activities in this realm reinforced feminists’ view that women’s and children’s oppression were deeply intertwined with one another. As their responses to IYC more generally would highlight, at the end of the 1970s, many felt that the concept of children’s liberation remained as pertinent as ever.

Afterword Care for Kids?

‘Care for Kids’—that was the message of the Australian government’s advertising jingle for International Year of the Child (IYC) in 1979. Performed by popular singer Peter Best, it quickly proved a hit. But, a year on, feminist sociologists Suzanne Franzway and Jan Lowe were not convinced that the year had served the interests of Australian children. ‘If International Year of the Child had any significance, it was that it was not about caring for kids but about preserving the family’, they declared.1 It was a damning assessment and by no means one that all feminists shared. Indeed, some had actively participated in the organisation of the year and worked to influence the official program in progressive directions, perhaps most notably Women’s Electoral Lobby member Helen L’Orange, who served as the executive director to the IYC National Committee of NonGovernment Organisations, a government-appointed body tasked with overseeing a range of community initiatives for the year. Even so, many activists, especially those with more radical leanings, remained more sceptical about IYC’s potential, particularly given the Fraser government’s cuts to social spending in the preceding years. The modest budget allocated to the year’s activities was hardly reassuring. A ‘derisory’ amount of just $639,000 had been announced by the beginning of 1979.2 By contrast, the Whitlam government had spent $3.3 million on International Women’s Year activities four years earlier.3

Starting in mid-1978, and continuing through 1979, women’s liberationists issued a series of scathing critiques of IYC celebrations in Australia. Their concerns were initially directed at conservative groups’ attempts to mobilise around IYC. The Festival of Light played a prominent role, seizing the opportunity to intensify its campaigns against abortion, sex education, pornography and homosexuality—starting with Mary Whitehouse’s tour in 1978, as we saw in the previous chapter. Anti-abortion groups also reacted quickly. They sought representation on official IYC committees and conducted an intense—though ultimately unsuccessful— campaign in support of Country Party politician Stephen Lusher’s private member’s bill seeking to restrict medical benefits for abortions, which was debated in federal parliament in March 1979.4 That month, the Perth Women’s Abortion Action Group captured feminists’ rising anxiety about the conservative backlash, urging ‘as many women as possible’ to support an upcoming abortion rights rally, ‘as this year is the “Year of the Child” and Pro-Lifers are out in force!’.5 Elsewhere, feminists had already begun responding to these developments, declaring IYC to be a masquerade for ‘family values’ and launching a counteroffensive. Sydney Women’s Liberation was amongst the first to react, issuing a warning at its June 1978 general meeting that IYC would be ‘used by bigoted groups, precisely against the interests of children and women’.6 By the end of the year, various efforts had been made to build coalitions with gay and lesbian activists and other radicals, with a view to resisting the conservative backlash and providing an alternative perspective on children’s rights. In December 1978, there were calls for Sydney Women’s Liberation to join a Coalition of the Left on IYC to ‘counteract the Festival of Light/nuclear family/anti-abortion approach’ to the year.7 Around the same time, the Melbourne group, Campaign Against Repression (CAR)—formed in the aftermath of Whitehouse’s visit—decided to make IYC one of its main focuses.8 Most of CAR’s core members were drawn from gay liberation, but the group also advertised its activities through feminist networks and publications, where its critiques of the ‘hypocrisy’ of the year were well received.9 As IYC celebrations progressed, however, it was not just the conservative co-option of IYC that attracted feminist criticism. Women’s

liberationists also took issue with the ‘mainstream’ approach pursued by the state and federal IYC secretariats, as well as established community and welfare organisations. IYC generated a wide range of activities, from conferences and seminars through to cultural activities, such as art competitions, festivals and film projects.10 A Sydney-based socialist feminist group issued a broadsheet, titled ‘Who’s Kidding Who in the Year of the Child?’, that identified two strands to these activities: the first focused on promoting ‘good times for kids’, the other the ‘plight’ of disadvantaged children who did not ‘have equal access to good times’. According to the group, both were complicit in perpetuating a romanticised view of childhood as a ‘state of innocence’ and could only offer ‘bandaid solutions’ rather than long-term improvements to children’s lives.11 A group of Victorian refuge activists who attended the official IYC National Conference in Canberra in March 1979 were likewise scathing of the focus on ‘issues such as exposing children to the opera or improving children’s television’—although they did welcome the fact that the conference would also be discussing ‘such crucial issues as children’s rights, children with special needs, and the development of children’s programmes’. In an open letter to conference participants, the group set out a series of other objections to the structure and administration of IYC, including the lack of federal government funding and the failure to include children in ways that treated them ‘as intelligent people with opinions worth listening to’.12 Given their reservations about the prevailing approach to IYC, we might expect women’s liberationists to have distanced themselves from the celebrations altogether. But the presence of the Victorian refuge workers at the national conference also signalled at least some activists’ commitment to engaging with IYC, which, if nothing else, had created a forum for public debate about the status of children in Australian society at the end of a decade of extraordinary social and political upheaval. In light of the threat posed by conservative groups, even the authors of the ‘Who’s Kidding Who’ broadsheet conceded that women’s liberationists could not afford to cede the ground altogether. To ‘ignore’ IYC or ‘merely condemn it … is to allow it to be used as a funding and propaganda vehicle for rightwing causes’, they warned.13

As well as participating in various coalition groups, women’s liberationists deliberated amongst themselves over how best to approach the year and ensure their views were represented. The evolving response of Melbourne activists to IYC is instructive. In November 1978, a small group of activists met at the Women’s Liberation Centre and discussed waging ‘an offensive campaign’ around IYC ‘rather than letting the [r]ight-wing … get a head start on us’. They noted that there were ‘several angles’ from which to approach the year, including free twenty-four-hour child care, sexism in education and ‘non-moralistic’ sex education.14 These concerns were by now familiar ones, building on the well-established campaigns initiated by women’s liberationists in the preceding years—and as the meeting participants reiterated, they remained central ones for the feminist agenda of children’s liberation at the end of the decade. Two months later, a report on the meeting appeared in the January 1979 issue of the local women’s liberation newsletter, which the editors had dedicated to the subject of IYC. Also featured was a half-page extract from Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), placed alongside an excerpt from North American radical feminist Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976).15 The juxtaposition was an intriguing one. Rich’s book is often identified as providing second-wave feminists with a new paradigm for understanding the maternal, through its distinction between motherhood as the ‘potential relationship’ of women to reproduction and motherhood as a male-controlled institution.16 It is, among other things, notable in its representation of the pregnant body as a possible site of female empowerment, a key point of difference with The Dialectic of Sex, which Rich criticised for its ‘shallow and unexamined’ critique of biological motherhood.17 But even as she critiqued Firestone, Rich also cited her as an important influence for her work.18 The placement of these two influential feminist thinkers beside each other—with Rich positioned as a successor of sorts to Firestone in her thinking about children —similarly complicates a neat teleological progress narrative of feminism. For the Melbourne newsletter editors, The Dialectic of Sex clearly still had something to offer as feminists grappled with the challenges presented by IYC. Yet if Firestone’s formative textwas still considered relevant, it was

also the case that Australian activists’ thinking about children’s liberation had evolved in important ways since the movement’s early years. While the list of concerns generated at the Melbourne meeting to discuss the movement’s response to IYC was by now a familiar one, none of these issues had proven to be straightforward when it came to putting children’s liberation into practice. Women’s liberationists’ own attempts to implement collective child care, while more extensive than credited, often fell short of their utopian vision, while the project of non-sexist education—alongside other forms of ‘deconditioning’—exposed the exercise of adult authority implicit in feminist forms of socialisation. The challenge of reconciling calls for children’s sexual freedom alongside their concerns about the prevalence of abuse increasingly weighed on activists’ minds—although many still maintained that the two could be reconciled with one another. At the end of the decade, the concept of children’s liberation still held powerful appeal, but it was also in many respects a more fraught one than many activists had first realised. The list generated by the Melbourne group also reflects some blind spots of the feminist agenda of children’s liberation, most notably when it came to issues of race and ethnicity. While many women’s liberationists recognised and took action to address these intersecting forms of oppression, they did not emerge as a central focus of their analyses and campaigns around children’s liberation—and in some cases, their actions on this front prompted sharp critique of the movement as driven by the interests of white women. During IYC, this was most obvious in relation to the removal of Indigenous children from their families by the state—an issue that still did not feature in a significant way in the movement’s discussions, but which was a focal point of Indigenous activism during the year. Ironically, some of the official avenues criticised by women’s liberationists offered a platform for raising these concerns. For example, Mollie Dyer, founder of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, featured as one of the invited speakers at the March 1979 IYC conference in Canberra, where she told attendees that ‘a lack of sensitised policy … has resulted in nothing short of total break-up, social dislocation and alienation of the Aboriginal people’.19 In subsequent decades, white feminists would continue to come under criticism for failing to adequately address the ways

in which the movement has prioritised issues that predominantly affect white women. While IYC did not see any resolution to this issue, the feminist politics of motherhood were undergoing revision in other ways. By the late 1970s, the treatment of mothers and their children within the movement was coming under increased scrutiny, in the wake of reports of a ‘feminist babyboom’, a phenomenon also observed overseas and reflective of demographic shifts within women’s liberation.20 In Melbourne, the Women and Children Discussion Group—a support group for mothers and other ‘child raisers’—began meeting in mid-1979, explaining that ‘[m]any of us feel a lack of understanding of our situation’.21 The following year, Meredith Quinn’s article outlining her experiences of feminist households in Sydney and querying childless women’s commitment to the principle of collective responsibility appeared in a special issue of Refractory Girl about ‘Feminism and Kids’ (see Chapter 2).22 And in 1982, at the Women and Labour Conference in Adelaide, lesbian feminist Barbara Wishart gave a paper on ‘Motherhood Within Patriarchy’ at a ‘packed’ workshop, in which she called for a wider reckoning with the feminist politics of motherhood, prompted by her recent experience of having a child. Wishart asserted that, after ‘lively debate about motherhood and the care of children’ during the movement’s early years, feminism had in the mid-1970s entered an ‘antimotherhood’ phase during which ‘other issues seemingly more important and more radical’ had been prioritised. In the process, feminists had contributed to the ‘continued oppression of women by our tacit or actual acceptance that motherhood is intrinsically negative’.23 It was a harsh indictment of the movement. The late 1970s have variously been characterised as a period of crisis, fragmentation and introspection for Australian women’s liberation.24 Debates about the treatment of mothers represent one manifestation of this wider phenomenon. They were not a new feature of women’s liberation politics, but they had become more pronounced at the end of the decade, making it increasingly difficult to disentangle the subject from the broader conflicts over the movement’s future during this period. As I noted at the outset of this book, these debates—and the importance accorded to them in feminist memory—have in turn had significant implications for the way in

which children have been positioned in histories of this period. They have not only overshadowed the ways in which women’s liberationists sought to transform the lives of mothers and their children—albeit often in ways that reflected their experiences as mainly white women—but have also made it difficult to see the many and varied ways in which the politics of children’s liberation manifested beyond this realm. This book has sought to reassess this ambivalence about feminism and motherhood and suggest other ways of making sense of this period. Undoubtedly, the legacy of this period for feminist mothers was a mixed one. Some felt that their children were not welcome in feminist spaces, and others were disappointed by the perceived failure of the movement to live up to its stated commitment to collective responsibility for children. But this was not necessarily a universal experience, nor the only way that mothers experienced the movement. As we have seen, many also experienced the movement as one that sought to accommodate them and their children, and that took seriously the principle of children’s liberation —not only by including them in feminist spaces, but by working to empower children and facilitate their political participation. And for many mothers their involvement in women’s liberation in turn profoundly reshaped their thinking about their own children, prompting them to make significant changes in their personal lives. Above all, this book has sought to place debates about motherhood in a wider context of feminist activism motivated by the goal of children’s liberation, highlighting the far-reaching implications of this radical vision and the diverse range of activists who contributed to it: not only feminist mothers, but teachers, cultural activists and feminist service workers too. The impact of feminist endeavours in the context of children’s liberation was not always easy to measure, but their cumulative impact should not be underestimated. Some initiatives were directed primarily at their own children, such as their experiments in communal living and non-sexist childrearing—although importantly they also hoped that by modelling these practices, they might spur broader cultural change. Many were short-lived or highly localised, emerging out of local women’s centres and action groups. Yet other initiatives expanded well beyond activists’ expectations: for example, the Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative (later the Sugar and Snails Press) published feminist children’s books for

over a decade, while domestic violence refuges and rape crisis services continue to provide essential support to children, as well as women. Moreover, even those interventions that were heavily contested, such as their efforts in the realms of sex education and reproductive choice, served to shape public consciousness and debate. The revolution in child rights envisioned by women’s liberationists in the 1970s may not have led to the ‘abolition’ of childhood, but it did lead to demonstrable change in the ways children were treated and viewed—the effects of which we can continue to see today. Indeed, if my interest when I first began this project was primarily intellectual, it has since taken on new resonances. The final stages of writing this book coincided with my own entry to motherhood. Like many, I was unprepared for just how unsettling parenthood would be—to my sense of self, my desires and my relationships, including grappling with the reality of my responsibility for—and power over—my daughter. In navigating the complex emotional terrain and physical demands of motherhood, I have felt a new appreciation for women’s liberationists’ ambitious vision—and the sheer effort, time and energy, and personal commitment required in pursuing their agenda of children’s liberation. As a new parent, one does not have to look far for evidence of the lasting impact of that vision. Friends of mine were quick to seek out feminist-themed gifts for my daughter and copies of board books about women and girl activists arrived at our doorstep within a few months of her birth. At the local toy store in my middle-class and overwhelmingly progressive neighbourhood, I discovered several brands offering ‘anatomically correct’ dolls—marketed as one way that parents can start having conversations about bodies and sex early on. When my daughter started at child care, I noted posters in the entryway welcoming breastfeeding and affirming the service’s support for gender and sexual diversity, along with an Acknowledgement of Country and copy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). But if these are all reminders of the ways in which certain feminist ideas from the 1970s have become more widely accepted and in some cases commodified—alongside other liberal discourses of diversity and tolerance —there is also plenty of unfinished business. Many of the other mothers I meet are well-attuned to the politics of gender and children’s socialisation,

and are conscious of how quickly this process begins. That women continue to carry a disproportionate load of domestic responsibilities associated with childrearing is also well documented—a disparity brought into sharp relief by the impact of lockdowns since COVID hit Australia in late February 2020, causing disruptions to child-care centres and schools that continue as I write this. The pandemic has also thrown up a range of other social concerns for women and children, from issues of mental health to domestic violence, and given further impetus to recent activist campaigns demanding more concerted political action in these arenas.25 The challenge also remains to meaningfully involve children in devising solutions to these issues. Feminist and other radicals’ calls for children’s liberation in the 1970s anticipated—and, in part, helped lay the groundwork for—subsequent shifts in the children’s rights field towards the recognition of children’s ‘participation’ rights, reflected both at the level of international law and in the practices of a wide range of government agencies and non-government organisations. Accordingly, when the first National Children’s Commissioner, Megan Mitchell, was appointed in 2013, she expressed a commitment to ensuring the views of ‘our youngest citizens’ are ‘sought, heard and taken up by adults in our community’.26 Since then we have seen children play an increasingly prominent role in public debate, most notably through the School Strike for Climate movement instigated in 2018, but also in a variety of other instances: for example, LGBTQIA+ children were at the forefront of the campaign to defend the Safe Schools program in 2016; Indigenous young people have played a crucial role in exposing abuse within the juvenile justice system, along with renewed efforts to raise the age of criminal responsibility, an issue that has gathered greater attention since a national campaign was launched in 2020; and high school girls’ calls for a stronger focus on sexual ethics and consent in the curriculum made headlines in early 2021 after an online survey exposed the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment by their male peers. Yet while the concept of children’s participation rights may now have more mainstream acceptance, and while children may have emerged as key players in a range of recent social justice campaigns, it also continues to be the case that they remain excluded from most formal decision-making. This

exclusion is one that young people feel keenly: a 2018 poll conducted by the National Children’s Commissioner found that amongst the rights that children felt were least true for them was their ability to ‘have a say about things that are important to me’.27 Even the position of commissioner is not itself unproblematic; it is apparently a step too far to appoint a child to the role. We also have yet to see whether children’s own mobilisations lead to a lasting increase in their political influence, with even moderate proposals to lower the voting age to sixteen so far gaining limited momentum. For all their efforts to recognise children as joint participants in the pursuit of their liberationist ideals, the dilemma of speaking on behalf of children was one that feminists too struggled with in the 1970s. Throughout this period, women’s liberationists grappled with the challenge of advocating a politics that simultaneously recognised children’s experiences of powerlessness and dependency, and their agency and autonomy. This tension is not easily resolved, but one insight we might draw from the era’s campaigns is that it is better recognised than ignored. Doing so also widens the focus from specific child rights concerns to the broader power relations between adults and children. Indeed, what remains striking about feminist campaigns in the 1970s is their emphasis not only on the most overt experiences of mistreatment or abuse, but the subtle and everyday ways in which children are disempowered. Decades later, we might do well to revisit some of the alternatives forged by feminists in the 1970s—bearing in mind both their successes and limitations—and consider how they might help us build a more equitable society for women and children alike.

Endnotes

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 103. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 72. Biff, ‘Reviews: Shulamith’, Mejane, no. 5 (November 1971): 12. For example, Firestone is cited as a key influence on Australian women’s liberation in Michelle Arrow and Angela Woollacott, ‘Revolutionising the Everyday’, 2; Suzanne Franzway, Dianne Court and R.W. Connell, Staking a Claim, 62; Patricia Grimshaw, ‘“Only the Chains Have Changed”’, 81; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal, 233. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 198. On this view of Firestone’s work, see Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived, 32. The wider generational upheavals of this period are well documented elsewhere. For an Australian perspective, see Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth; Peter Cochrane, ‘A War at Home’, 165– 85. For broad overviews of the children’s liberation position, see David Archard, Children, 45-51; David Oswell, The Agency of Children,

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

240–41. See, for example, Lake, Getting Equal, ch. 2, especially 57–58, 66– 71 and 146–47. For international comparisons, see Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890–1970. On the contrast between women’s liberation and earlier feminisms, see Ann Curthoys, ‘Doing It for Themselves’, 425; Lake, Getting Equal, 214–27; Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, A Woman’s Place, 234–36. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 104; Arrow and Woollacott, ‘Revolutionising the Everyday’, 1. Lake, Getting Equal, 231. Joanne Faulkner, The Importance of Being Innocent, 6. Kerry Robinson, Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood, 8–9. See also Steven Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality. Frank Golding, ‘Sexual Abuse as the Core Transgression of Childhood Innocence’, 191–203. Australian Associated Press, ‘Scott Morrison Tells Students Striking Over Climate Change to Be “Less Activist”’, 26 November 2018. Barbara Baird, ‘Child Politics, Feminist Analyses’, 298. Michelle Arrow, The Seventies, 7. The literature on these movements is wide-ranging. For broad overviews, see Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee, eds., Staining the Wattle; Verity Burgmann, Power and Protest. Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest, 204. Susan Magarey, ‘Sisterhood and Women’s Liberation in Australia’. The formation of groups in different cities is recorded in relevant entries in Barbara Caine et al., eds., Australian Feminism: A Companion. These developments are discussed in more detail throughout this book. For further background, see Arrow, The Seventies; Burgmann, Power and Protest, ch. 2; Lake, Getting Equal, chs. 9 and 10. The concept of ‘cultural renaissance’ was first used in Curthoys, ‘Doing It for Themselves’, 427. For a discussion of these features of women’s liberation, see Susan Magarey, ‘Women’s Liberation Was a Movement, Not an

27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34

35

Organisation’, 378–90. On the Australian movement’s links to the new left more generally, see also Arrow, The Seventies, 36; Burgmann, Power and Protest, 82; Curthoys, ‘The Anti-War Movement’, 103–04; Lake, Getting Equal, 220. Marian Sawer, Making Women Count, 11–15. On activists’ preference for the term ‘women’s liberation’, see Anne Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 265. Early examples include Susan Eade, ‘Now We Are Six’, Refractory Girl, no.13–14 (March 1977): 3–11 (Eade was the married name of Susan Magarey); Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collective, Herstory of the Halfway House, 1974–1976; Sylvia Kinder, Herstory of the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Movement 1969–1974. The first archival project was that established by Sydney activists in June 1978 to document the First Ten Years of Sydney Women’s Liberation, followed by the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives (established in 1983) and the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Movement Archive (established in 1984). They include Zelda D’Aprano, Zelda; Robyn Rowland, ed. Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement; Jocelynne Scutt, ed. Different Lives; Joyce Stevens, Healing Women; Summers, Ducks on the Pond; Summers, Unfettered and Alive; Jean Taylor, Brazen Hussies. Jean Curthoys, Feminist Amnesia, 8. Susan Magarey, ‘The Sex Discrimination Act 1984’, 128. Susan Magarey, Dangerous Ideas, 5. Along with a number of organisational histories of state branches, the history of WEL at a national level is documented in Sawer, Making Women Count. Key accounts of the femocracy include Hester Eisenstein Inside Agitators; Gender Shock; Hester Eisenstein; Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim; Marian Sawer, Sisters in Suits; Sophie Watson, ed., Playing the State; and Anna Yeatman, Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats. The most public instance of this is Anne Summers, ‘Letter to the Next Generation’, in Damned Whores and God’s Police. On the implications of generational debates for understandings of feminism’s

36

37

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41 42 43

44

history, see also Chilla Bulbeck, ‘Explaining the Generation Debate’, 35–47. Notable recent additions include Arrow, The Seventies; Michelle Arrow and Angela Woollacott, eds., Everyday Revolutions; Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson, eds., Things That Liberate; ‘How the Personal Became Political’ (special issue), Australian Feminist Studies 33, no. 95 (2018). For recent reviews of the US and British literature respectively, see Sara M. Evans, ‘Women’s Liberation’, 138–49; and Sue Bruley and Laurel Forster, ‘Historicising the Women’s Liberation Movement’, 697–700. Rare mentions of children’s liberation appear in Jean Taylor, Brazen Hussies, 627; Kinder, Herstory, 152; Magarey, ‘Women’s Liberation Was a Movement, Not an Organisation’, 381. Child care is consistently mentioned in general histories of Australian second-wave feminism and is discussed in particular detail in Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care; Brennan, ‘Childcare’, 19–25; Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, ch. 4. For example, Jane Gaskell and Sandra Taylor, ‘The Women’s Movement in Canadian and Australian Education’, 151–68; Julie McLeod, ‘The Promise of Freedom and the Regulation of GenderFeminist Pedagogy in the 1970s’; Julie McLeod, ‘The Discovery of Sexism in Schools’, 37–61; Sandra Taylor, ‘Teachers’ Union Activism for Gender Equity’; Lyn Yates, The Education of Girls. Suellen Murray, More Than Refuge, 63–67; Jacqui Theobald, Suellen Murray and Judith Smart, From the Margins to the Mainstream, especially 41–42. For example, Jan Breckenridge, ‘An Exotic Phenomenon? Incest and Child Rape’; Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 114–28; Gail Mason, ‘Violence’, 340. Leslie Paris, ‘Happily Ever After: Free to Be… You and Me, SecondWave Feminism and 1970s American Children’s Culture’, 523. See also Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett, eds., When We Were Free to Be. Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived, 16.

45 46 47 48 49

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55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

‘Unmarried Mothers’, Mejane, no. 9 November, (1972), 5. Rosalyn Baxandall, ‘Revisioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative’, 234. Natasha Campo, ‘“Feminism Failed Me”’, 325. See also Natasha Campo, From Superwomen to Domestic Goddesses. Monica Dux and Zora Simic, The Great Feminist Denial, 109. See for example, Chris Everingham, ‘Motherhood’, 226–27; Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 62-65. For detailed analyses of these arguments, see Jennifer Somerville, Feminism and the Family; Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived. Ann Snitow, ‘Feminism and Motherhood’, 34. Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 63. Curthoys, ‘Doing It For Themselves’, 436. On anti-abortion groups’ use of the language of human rights, see Jon Piccini, Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia, 143–51. On the formation and tactics of anti-abortion groups in Australia through the 1970s, see also Erica Millar, Happy Abortions, ch. 1; and Erica Millar, ‘Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives’, 501–19. On the history of anti-feminist groups in Australia, see Arrow, The Seventies, 204–12; Rowland, Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement; Irene Webley, ‘The New Right and Women Who Want to Be Women in Australian Politics in the 1980s’; Irene Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’. Isobelle Barrett Meyering, ‘Children’s Rights, the Family and “Sexual Permissiveness”: Conservative Mobilisations and the Australian Response to International Year of the Child (1979)’. Isobelle Barrett Meyering, ‘“There Must Be a Better Way”’. Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 62. Jackie Huggins, ‘Black Women and Women’s Liberation’, 78. Catherine Kevin, ‘Maternity and Freedom’, 4. Carla Pascoe, ‘The History of Children in Australia’, 1143. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Erica Burman and Jackie Stacey, ‘The Child and Childhood in Feminist Theory’, 230. Lake, Getting Equal, 249. Jan Larbalestier, ‘Identity and Difference’, 153.

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76

77

78

Lake, Getting Equal, 219. Arrow, The Seventies, 78–79. Fima, ‘Experiences of Migrant Women’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 4 (July 1973): 7; ‘Eulalia: Reflections on Growing Up Italian Australian and Female’, Vashti’s Voice, no.10 (Autumn 1975): 9, 12. Stevens, Healing Women, 48–49. Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest, 128; Reade, ‘Struggling to Be Heard: Tensions between Different Voices in the Australian Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 1980s’, 217–18. Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, ‘Multicultural Feminism’, 236. Lake, Getting Equal, 267; Adele Murdolo, ‘Safe Homes for Immigrant and Refugee Women’, 126–53; and Pallotta-Chiarolli, ‘Multicultural Feminism’, 236–37. Pat O’Shane, ‘Is There Any Relevance in the Women’s Movement for Aboriginal Women?’, Refractory Girl, no. 12 (September 1976): 33–34. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman, xviii. See for example, Heather Goodall and Jackie Huggins, ‘Aboriginal Women Are Everywhere: Contemporary Struggles’,402; Lake, Getting Equal, 249; Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman, 167, 171. O’Shane, ‘Is There Any Relevance in the Women’s Movement for Aboriginal Women?’, 34. For a recent discussion of Aboriginal women’s activism around these issues, see Johanna Perheentupa, Redfern: Aboriginal Activism in the 1970s, 131-57. ‘Black Women in Society’, Women and Politics Conference, 1975 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1977), vol. 2, 209. On Indigenous women’s representation at the conference, see Arrow, The Seventies, 129. On Murawina, see Perheentupa, Redfern, 131–57. On Dyer’s activism and the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, see Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800-2000, 60004; Fiona Davis, ‘Kooris, Ghubbas and Others: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in the Work of Aboriginal Leader Mollie Dyer’. Lake, Getting Equal, 222.

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81

Interviews conducted by the author were undertaken with the approval of the UNSW Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel (Arts, Humanities and Law), project number HC15239. Other interviews are drawn from existing oral history collections. Maryanne Dever and Margaret Henderson, ‘The Activist’s Archive’, 221. See also Alison Bartlett, Maryanne Dever and Margaret Henderson, ‘Notes Towards an Archive of Australian Feminist Activism’. For a recent discussion of different approaches, see Nell Musgrove, Carla Pascoe Leahy and Kristine Moruzi, ‘Hearing Children’s Voices’, 13–20.

Chapter 1 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

‘Only the Chains Have Changed’, First Ten Years of Sydney Women’s Liberation Collection, box 31, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. For an account of the meeting, see Susan Magarey, ‘Sisterhood and Women’s Liberation in Australia’. On the emergence of women’s liberation in Sydney, see Sue Wills, ‘Seventies Chronology, Part I’, 401. ‘Group Reports’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971): 15. Magarey, ‘Women’s Liberation Was a Movement, Not an Organisation’, 381. For examples of this tendency, see Ann Oakley, ‘Women and Children First and Last’, 19, 31; and Barrie Thorne, ‘Re-Visioning Women and Social Change’, 105, footnote 4. See examples cited in Lake, Getting Equal, 237; Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 63; Rebecca Jennings, ‘The Boy-Child in Australian Lesbian Feminist Discourse and Community’, 71–73. Anne Summers, ‘Free the Children’, On Dit, 6 September 1971, 5. Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 241. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 370–72. Summers, ‘Free the Children’, 5. Ibid., 6.

13

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On the impact of his work, see for example David Oswell, The Agency of Children, ch. 2; and Alan Prout and Allison James, ‘A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood?’, 13–15. For a discussion of the major critiques of Ariès’ work that emerged in subsequent decades, see Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood, 12–15. Rosalyn Baxandall, ‘On Shulamith Firestone’. Stevi Jackson, ‘Questioning the Foundations of Heterosexual Families’, 116. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 93; David Archard, Children, 46. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 91. Ibid., 93. For an example of such a critique, see Margaret A. Simons, ‘Racism and Feminism’, especially 393–95 on Firestone. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 95. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 100. Ibid. Ibid., 101–102. Jackson, ‘Questioning the Foundations of Heterosexual Families’, 122. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 72. Ibid., 88–89. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 104. John Holt, Escape from Childhood, 23. Paul Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72. Dennis Altman, Homosexual, 85. Biff, ‘Reviews: Shulamith’, Mejane, no. 5 (November 1971): 12. Julia Ryan, interview by Sara Dowse, 26 September 1990. ‘Meetings’, Liberation, no. 6 (August 1971): 1. ‘Children’s Liberation’, Liberation, no. 6 (August 1971): 3–4. The texts referred to were John Holt, The Underachieving School; and

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ivan Illich, ‘Schooling: The Ritual of Progress’, New York Review of Books, 3 December 1970. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 11. Tim Fisken, ‘Technology, Nature, and Liberation’, 197–214. Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived, 32. Kevin, ‘Maternity and Freedom’, 5. Lyndall Ryan, ‘Mother and Daughter Feminists’, 79. Biff, ‘Reviews: Shulamith’, 12. Sarah Franklin, ‘Revisiting Reprotech’, 32. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 239. Ibid., 104. In keeping with feminist practice at the time, Bellamy’s name was left off the article on ‘Children and Liberation’, but she later identified herself as its author. Suzanne Bellamy, ‘Newspaper: Mejane’, 109. ‘Children & Liberation’, Mejane, no. 3 (July 1971), 8. Ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8. Robin Harper, interview by author, 7 October 2014. Joyce Stevens, A History of International Women’s Day in Words and Images, 43–52. Ibid., 30, 32, 38. On the Canberra group’s performance, see ‘Women’s Liberation (WEL’s Predecessor)’. ‘Kate and Leila’, Mejane, no. 7 (April 1972): 10. Wills, ‘Seventies Chronology, Part I’, 405. Millar, Happy Abortions, 72–73. See also: Millar, ‘Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives’, 501–19. Jan Harper, interview by author, 7 October 2014. Taylor, Brazen Hussies, 627. ‘We Welcome You to the Women’s Centre’, Women’s Liberation, May–June 1974. Daphne Spain, ‘Women’s Rights and Gendered Spaces in 1970s Boston’, 155. Sue Wills, ‘The Politics of Sexual Liberation’, 30.

65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

73 74

75 76 77 78 79

‘Children’s Liberation Day’, Mejane, no. 9 (November 1972): 16; ‘Calendar of Events’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, October 1972, 11. ‘Children’s Craft Day, July 7 10.30AM to 2PM’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1973, 11a. ‘Working Bees’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, December 1973. Stevens, Healing Women, 28. ‘Women’s Health Centres in Australia: A Report’, folder 5/3, Women’s Health and Community Centre (WHCC) – Terry 1 box, Lespar Library Collection, Gay and Lesbian Archives of Western Australia, Murdoch University Library, Perth. Stevens, Healing Women, 48–49. Cited in Taylor, Brazen Hussies, 145. Kristin T., ‘Food for Thought’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, December 1974. Cited in Lake, Getting Equal, 237. On the exclusion of boys from feminist spaces, see Jennings, ‘The BoyChild in Australian Lesbian Feminist Discourse and Community’, 71–73. Untitled, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, July 1977, 13. Also cited in Jennings, ‘The Boy-Child’, 70. Of these, at least three schools responded positively; by the end of the year, visits to Lyneham, Dickson and Watson High Schools had been undertaken. Minutes of Canberra Women’s Liberation, 30 September, 27 October, 11 November, 25 November and 2 December 1970, folder 1, box 1, Papers of Christine Fernon MS7689, National Library of Australia. ‘Group Report’, Mejane, no. 2 (May 1971): 15; Penny Ewin, ‘From Perth’, Mejane, no. 9 (November 1972): 15. Linda Young, ‘After the Commission’, Mejane 2, no. 1 (July 1973): 4. ‘Being a Woman Isn’t All Roses’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March 1973, 26. For a recent discussion of the Women’s Commission, see Arrow, The Seventies, 48–56. Young, ‘After the Commission’, Mejane 2, no. 1 (July 1973): 4. Ibid., 5.

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

89 90 91 92 93

For one such example, see Ann McGrath, ‘The Female Eunuch in the Suburbs’, 177–90. Caroline Jones, ‘Germaine Greer’, This Day Tonight. Gail Shelston, ‘News Report’, Women’s Action Programme for I.W.Y., November 1975, 2, WHCC Pamphlets – Conference Papers box, Lespar Library Collection. NSW Teachers Federation, ‘Women’s Action Programme’, 1975, WHCC Pamphlets – Conference Papers box, Lespar Library Collection; ‘Editorial’, Refractory Girl, no. 13-14 (March1977):2. Jenny Pausacker, Role Your Own. Jan Harper, ‘“Role Your Own” Evaluation Study’, December 1976, folder 4, box 10, Sugar and Snails Press Co-operative Ltd Collection, 1991.0132, UMA. Jan Schapper et al., If I Was a Lady, and Other Picture Stories; Joyce Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls; and Gabrielle Walsh and Gary Dowsett, School Days, School Days, Good Ol’ Sexist School Days: Combat Sexism Kit. ‘Students Put the Questions’, Liberation Information, April/May 1973, 3. On the anti-war movement and high school activism, see for example Alan Barcan, From New Left to Factional Left, 85–86; and John Murphy, Harvest of Fear, 257–58. On high school activism more generally, see Isobelle Barrett Meyering, ‘The Margaret Bailey Case’, 183–97. ‘Conference Committee Proposals’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Conference, 30 January–1 February 1971, box 31, First Ten Years Collection. ‘Women’s Liberation and High School Students’, 1971, box 27, First Ten Years Collection. ‘Female Sexuality & Education’, October 1971, box 11, series 11.16, Records of Brisbane Women’s House, UQFL457, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane. ‘High School Group’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, July 1972, 4. ‘Women’s Liberation High School Group’, February 1973, box 27, First Ten Years Collection.

94

95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Words for Women, ‘What They Say…. But …. We Want Our Own Say….’, March 1973, WHCC Pamphlets box, Lespar Library Collection; and ‘Women’s Liberation High School Group’, February 1973, box 27, First Ten Years Collection. The Melbourne and Brisbane groups are mentioned respectively in Taylor, Brazen Hussies, 287; Margaret Henderson and Margaret Reid, ‘“It’s Not That Bloody Far from Sydney”: Notes Towards a Semiotic History of the Brisbane Women’s Movement, 1973-1983’, 163. News cuttings indicate that the Brisbane group was revived for a period in 1977: ‘These Gymslip Libbers Ban the Boys’, 7 December 1975, news clipping (source not stated) and ‘High School Girls Start Up a Feminist Group’, news clipping, The Cairns Post, ca. 1977, box 30, series 24.1, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. Kera Lovell, ‘Girls Are Equal Too’, 75. ‘Paper Given by Feminist High School Group’, Liberation, no. 37 (1976): 30. ‘Letters’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 6 (March 1974): 2. ‘Poems’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 9 (Summer 1974–1975): 13. Lori Rotskoff, ‘“Little Women’s Libbers” and “Free to Be Kids”’, 102. Lisa, ‘Brivya Brontosaurus’, Womanspeak 1, no. 1 (1974): 20. ‘Being a Woman Isn’t All Roses’, 26. ‘Women and Girls: Our Experiences in the Schools’, box 31, First Ten Years Collection.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5

Judy Gillett, ‘Women–Liberation–Revolution’, Australian Left Review, no. 32 (September 1971): 22. Judy Gillett, ‘Child Care’, Liberation, no. 5 (July 1971): 3. Arrow, The Seventies, 98. Brennan, ‘Childcare’, 22. On this point, see also Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 206. For a recent discussion, see Kirsten Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, 169–72. For personal examples, see Rosalyn Baxandall,

6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

‘Catching the Fire’, 216–20; Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave, 12–13, 56; and Sheila Rowbotham, The Past Is Before Us, 110, 130. Brennan’s account is the most detailed and wide ranging. See Brennan, ‘Childcare’, especially 66–67, 79–83. Other accounts focus on femocrats and child care, for example Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 70–86; Lyndall Ryan, ‘Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy 1972–1983’, especially 76–77; and Sawer, Sisters in Suits, 14–16. On WEL and child care, see Sawer, Making Women Count, 46–48, 131–34, 200–03. Ann Curthoys, ‘Men and Childcare in the Feminist Utopia’, Refractory Girl, no.10 (March 1976): 3. Ibid., 4. Perheentupa, Redfern, 131. Fima, ‘Experiences of Migrant Women’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 4 (July 1973): 7. Of particular note, child care was addressed in two key reports on migrant women: Eva Cox, Sue Jobson and Jeannie Martin, ‘We Cannot Talk Our Rights’; and Des Storer, But I Wouldn’t Want My Wife to Work Here. For a discussion of these reports, see Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 143. See also Eva Cox, ‘Policy Contest: Immigrant Women on a Flat Playing Field’, 25–26. Ashley Lavelle, Radical Challenges to the Family, 2. Ibid., 83. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, ch. 1. Ibid., 277. Ibid., 271. ‘Coming Events’, Canberra Women’s Liberation Newsletter, December 1970; ‘Xmas – New Year Period’, Canberra Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1971; ‘Future Meetings’, Canberra Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1971. ‘Eastern Suburbs Bread & Roses’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, July 1972, 3. Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, 32. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 288. Christine Wallace, Greer, Untamed Shrew, especially 198–200, 284– 86. Peggy Greer’s alleged violence is also touched on briefly in the

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

more recent biography, Elizabeth Kleinhenz, Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer,20. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health. For a discussion of his work and its influence during this period, see Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women, 293. John Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love, 18. Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 59, 63; Eva Cox, ‘Pater-Patria: Child-Rearing and the State’, 196–97. Lee Comer, ‘The Motherhood Myth’, 29. Ibid., 193–212. Kathie Gleeson, ‘Wedlocked Women’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 11 (Winter 1975): 15. On ‘men’s liberation’ in Australia, including men’s consciousnessraising groups, see Sophie Robinson, ‘The Man Question: Men and Women’s Liberation in 1970s Australia’. Mike Radley et al., Unbecoming Men, 13. On the collection and men’s liberation groups in North America, see Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, 49. On effeminism in Australia, see Robinson, ‘The Man Question’; Robert Reynolds, From Camp to Queer, 146-50; and Graham Willett, Living out Loud, 70–71. ‘The Effeminist Manifesto: Principles of Revolutionary Effeminism’, issued by Melbourne University Gay Liberation. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 95. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. For a discussion of the influence of Engels on feminist analyses of the family, see Clare Burton, ‘Engels, The Origins of the Family and Feminist Theory’, especially 5–7. Virginia, ‘The Nuclear Family’, paper presented at the Women’s Liberation Conference, 30 January–1 February 1971, box 31, First Ten Years Collection. Linda Gordon, ‘Functions of the Family’, 185. ‘Women’s Liberation Movement, Adelaide’, Liberation, no. 4 (June 1971). ‘Fifty Years of Labour Force: Now and Then’, Australian Bureau of Statistics.

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 62–63. Untitled, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, July 1970. ‘Glebe Group’, Mejane, no. 3 (July 1971): 15; ‘Hurstville Group’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, November 1971, 5; ‘Group Reports’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1973, 4; ‘Group Reports’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, February 1974, 4–5; ‘Group Reports’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, July 1974, 1, 4. ‘Child Care Action Group’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, August 1972, 4; Wills, ‘The Politics of Sexual Liberation’, 30. On child care in universities more generally, see Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 160–63. ‘From Perth’, Mejane, no. 9 (November 1972): 15. ‘Child Care’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 7 (June-July 1974): 5. For a detailed discussion of the campaign, see John Riddoch Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen, A Place Apart, 408–10. Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 63. Ibid., 67–68. Ibid., 63. Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us, 131. ‘Impressions of the Conference’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1970. Wills, ‘Seventies Chronology, Part I’, 401. Lesley, ‘Child Care Centres—Part One: A Personal Account’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971): 5. Jude Ellis, ‘Beware of Child Care’, Liberation, no. 7 (1971): 8; Louise Gross and Phyllis MacEwan, ‘On Day Care’, 201. Gross and MacEwan, ‘On Day Care’, 202. For a discussion of the movement’s early critiques of the state, see Magarey, ‘Women’s Liberation Was a Movement, Not an Organisation’, 378–90. See also Judith Allen, ‘Does Feminism Need a Theory of “the State”?’, 23–26. Ann, ‘Some Ideas’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971): 9, 14. The article, by Ann Curthoys, appeared as part of a spread on ‘Women at Work: Housewives’.

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76

Camille, ‘NSW Women’s Lib Conference’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971): 14. Kathie Gordon, ‘Ivan D. Illich’s Deschooling Society’, Mejane, no. 10 (March 1973): 18. Lake, Getting Equal, 103–06; and Bettina Cass, ‘Redistribution to Children and Mothers’, especially 61–63. Gordon, ‘Ivan D. Illich’s Deschooling Society’, 18. Winsome McCaughey, ‘Day Care—Liberating Who for What?’, Dissent, no. 28 (Winter 1972): 3–8. Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 66. Perheentupa, Redfern, 131. Brennan, ‘Childcare’, 144–45. Barbara Gayler, cited in ibid., 145. Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 66. Sawer, Making Women Count, 201. ‘Community Controlled Child Care’, authorised by Winsome McCaughey, Melbourne, box 31, First Ten Years Collection. This version was circulated at the Women’s Liberation National Conference, held in Sydney from 10-12 June 1972. Sophie Inwald and Winsome McCaughey, Doing It Together, 16. Ibid., 17. Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 83. Arrow, The Seventies, 100. For a detailed discussion of these developments, see Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 85–92, 99–100; and Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking a Claim, 70–73. Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care, 92–95. Katie Sutherland, ‘The History of Us’, Rattler, no. 87 (2008): 10. For example, ‘Two Little Notes from Gill’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1973: 11a; ‘Calling Any Woman in Distress!!!’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, December 1973, 4; and ‘Child Care’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, April 1974, 16. ‘Lesbian Mothers Group’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, August 1980, 6. Betsy Wearing, The Ideology of Motherhood, 12.

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Ibid., 80–82. Ibid., 89. Letter, Sibyl, no. 3 (April 1975): 38. Ann Curthoys, For and Against Feminism, 31. Wearing, The Ideology of Motherhood, 108–09. Jan Harper, Fathers at Home, 5. Ti-Grace Atkinson, ‘The Institution of Sexual Intercourse’, 42–47. Wearing, The Ideology of Motherhood, 108. Deirdre Ferguson, interview by author, 28 January 2014. For a recent history of the family court, see Shurlee Swain, Born in Hope. ‘Letters’, Womanspeak 4, no. 5 (June–July 1979): 2. Harper, Fathers at Home, 12. Rebecca Jennings, ‘Lesbian Mothers and Child Custody’, 502–17; and Margaret Bateman, ‘Lesbians, Gays and Child Custody’, 47–54. Greer, The Female Eunuch, 235. Ibid., 236. Ryan interview. Biff Macdougall, ‘French Without Tears: Communal Bliss in Canberra?’, Mejane, no. 6 (1972): 14. Editorial note, Mejane, no. 6 (1972): 14. The article they were referring to was most likely Vivian Estellachild, ‘Hippie Communes’, Women: A Journal of Women’s Liberation (Winter 1971), 40–43. Beryl Donaldson, ‘Woman’s Place in the Counter Culture’, 433. For a longer discussion of gender politics in the countercultural movement, see Carroll Pursell, ‘Making the Political Personal’, 63–82. Julia Orange, ‘Just One Big, Happy Family’, Sydney Morning Herald, Look!, 13 July 1972, 3. North Shore Women’s Liberation Group Newsletter, ca. September 1972, box 8, First Ten Years Collection. Ryan interview. Helen Garner, Monkey Grip. For a more detailed discussion of the book, including Garner’s use of personal experience, see Bernadette Brennan, A Writing Life, ch. 2; Zora Simic, ‘“Unmistakably a Book By a Feminist”: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Its Feminist Contexts’, 139–59.

100 101 102 103

104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Sue King, ‘Monkey Grip’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 21 (Summer-Autumn 1978): 35. ‘Sue King’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 14 (Autumn 1976): 23. Wearing, The Ideology of Motherhood, 162. These appeared in the section, ‘For Your Information’ in the Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter in August 1973, September 1973, October 1973 and November 1973, and the section ‘Accommodation’ in February 1974, March 1974, April 1974. On collective childrearing as an ideal in lesbian households in particular, see Jennings, ‘The Boy-Child in Australian Lesbian Feminist Discourse and Community’, 69. Cited in Willett, Living out Loud, 69. For a detailed account of Amazon Acres and other women’s lands, see Judith Ion, ‘Degrees of Separation’, 97-113; Fenella Souter, ‘Amazon Acres—Girls’ Own Adventure’, ABC Radio National, 30 July 2019; Fenella Souter, ‘Amazon Acres—Sisterhood Under Siege’, ABC Radio National, 6 August 2019. ‘Recent Developments’, Amazon Acres Newsletter, June 1974, box 2, Office of the Status of Women Collection, 2000.0233/VWLLFA no. 74, University of Melbourne Archives (UMA). ‘Amazon Acres’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, March 1975, 10. See also Jennings, ‘The Boy-Child’, 69. Christian Women Concerned, ‘Jottings from Mini-Commission held at Epping’, 2 March 1974, box 27, First Ten Years Collection. Ion, ‘Degrees of Separation’, 104, 107, 110. ‘Radicalesbian Weekend at Sorrento’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 5 (November–December 1973): 13. ‘Sue King’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 14 (Autumn 1976): 23. Meredith Quinn, ‘What’s the Matter with Kids Today?’, Refractory Girl, no. 20–21 (October 1980): 18. Helen Garner, Honour and Other People’s Children, 80. For an extended discussion of the book, see Brennan, A Writing Life, ch. 3. Quinn, ‘What’s the Matter with Kids Today’, 18.

Chapter 3

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

Sylvia Innes, ‘Are Our Schools Sexist?’, March 1976, ‘Educate to Liberate’ insert, Queensland Teachers Journal (March 1976): 4. For example, see Burgmann, Power and Protest, 110–11; Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest, 41–47; and Lake, Getting Equal, 228. For an overseas example, see Carol Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, 197. Recent North American work on feminist children’s culture has gone the furthest in addressing this lacuna in movement histories. See Paris, ‘Happily Ever After’, 519–38; Rotskoff and Lovett, eds., When We Were Free to Be. Joyce Thorpe Nicholson and Daniel Wrixon Thorpe, A Life of Books, 244. Joyce Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls, 7. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9. ‘It’s a Success…’, Womanspeak 2, no. 2 (February–March 1976), 24– 25. Joyce Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls, 2nd ed. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, 54. These ideas were developed in Talcott Parsons, The Social System, and Talcott Parsons and Robert Freed Bales, Family: Socialization and Interaction Process. For a discussion of the early development of sex role theory, including Parson’s work, see R. W. Connell, Gender and Power, 29–32. For a recent discussion of consciousness raising as feminist practice, see Arrow, The Seventies, 47–50. The experience of one such group is recorded in detail in Kristin Henry and Marlene Derlet, Talking up a Storm. ‘A Guide to Consciousness-Raising’, Ms., July 1972, 22. The guide appears in a collection of materials of the Women’s Liberation Centre, Sydney, Box 8, First Ten Years Collection. ‘Sugar and Spice Middle Class Nice’, Mejane, no. 2 (May 1971): 7. ‘Eulalia: Reflections on Growing Up Italian Australian and Female’, Vashti’s Voice, no.10 (Autumn 1975): 9, 12. Lisa, ‘How School Makes You Into a Lady’, Mabel, no. 6 (December 1976–January 1977): 19. Anna Craney, ‘A Day of Scrapes’, Cauldron 1, no. 3 (1975): 7.

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Jenny Garlick, ‘What About Schools?’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971): 11. Noel Ridgway, ‘“It Never Affected Me”: A Look at Sexism in Early Childhood’, Refractory Girl, no. 13–14 (March 1977): 13. Summers, ‘Free the Children’, 5. Ibid. ‘Children & Liberation’, Mejane, no. 3 (July 1971): 8. Laing, The Politics of Experience, and, the Bird of Paradise, 43. On the influence of Laing’s work more generally on Australian feminists, see Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, 296. ‘Nuclear Family’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 2 (1972): 2. For example, Gordon, ‘Ivan D. Illich’s Deschooling Society’, 18; Pat Vort-Ronald, ‘A Culture of Illich’, Australian Left Review, no. 42 (December 1973): 35. Hannah Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University, 76– 78. Jozefa Sobski, interview by author, 17 March 2014. ‘Research Notes’, Refractory Girl, no. 4 (Spring 1974): 51. For an overview of this literature, see Karin A. Martin, ‘William Wants a Doll’. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, ‘Down with Sexist Upbringing’, Ms. insert, New York Magazine, 20 December 1971, 110–118; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Growing up Free. Pogrebin, ‘Down with Sexist Upbringing’, 110. Ibid., 114. Speech, c. 1972, box 27, Sugar & Snails Co-operative Press Cooperative Ltd (Sugar & Snails Press) Collection, 1991.0132, UMA 1991.0132, UMA. Deirdre Ferguson, interview by author, 28 January 2014. Suzanne Dixon, ‘Confessions of a Sisterhoodlum’, 201. Ibid., 203. ‘Notices’, Canberra Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1972. ‘Westbury Street Co-operative Child Care-Centre Policy’, 21 February 1975, folder 25, box 55, Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collection, 2000.0298/VWLLFA no. 100, UMA.

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Westbury Street Childcare Centre, ‘Policies’, c. 1978, folder 25, box 55, Halfway House Collection. ‘As Feminists, as Lesbians, as Mothers’, Scarlet Woman, no. 4 (July 1976): 21. Also cited in Jennings, ‘The Boy-Child’, 72. Isobelle Barrett Meyering, ‘Changing Consciousness, Changing Lifestyles’. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. For example, Curthoys, ‘Doing It for Themselves’, 427; Susan Magarey, ‘Feminism as Cultural Renaissance.’ These aspects of feminist culture have each received separate attention in the scholarly literature. For a detailed overview, see Arrow, The Seventies, 118–123. Zora Simic, ‘“Women’s Writing” and “Feminism”: A History of Intimacy and Estrangement’. See for example Elizabeth Webby, ‘Children’s Literature’, 397; Louise Poland, ‘Printing Presses and Protest Banners’, 121, 123; Trish Luker, ‘Women into Print’, 132–33. Denise Bradley and Mary Mortimer, ‘Sex Role Stereotyping in Children’s Picture Books’, Refractory Girl, no. 1 (Summer 1972–73), 10. Ibid., 12. Denise Bradley, interview by author, 20 October 2014. ‘Conference Papers’, Refractory Girl, no. 3 (Winter 1973): 31–32. ‘Group Reports’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1973, 4; ‘Group Reports’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, February 1973, 4. Evans, Tidal Wave, 56. ‘The Feminist Bookshop Booklist’, April 1974, box 50, First Ten Years Collection. Jan Harper, ‘Liberating Literature’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 7 (June–July 1974): 13. Jan Harper, interview by author, 7 October 2014. Harper, ‘Liberating Literature’, 13. David Harris to Jan Harper, 22 June 1973, box 24, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. Harper interview.

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Chairwoman’s Report, 18 February 1975, box 4, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. Chairperson’s Report, 17 February 1976, box 4, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. On their careers, see Stella Lees and Pamela Macintyre, The Oxford Companion to Australian Children’s Literature, 112, 337–38. Hilary McPhee, Other People’s Words, 136–37. Jan Harper, ‘Guidelines for Writers/Media’, 1975, box 27, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. Judith Bathie, The Princess and the Painter; Mary Pershall, ‘The Scarf’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 22 September 1976, 134. Judith Bathie, Alison and the Bear, 4. Judith Crabtree, The High Rise Gang, 38. Renate Howe, ‘“Nobody but a Bunch of Mothers”’, 331–40. Jenny Pausacker, Sugar and Snails: A Countersexist Booklist, 14. Jan Harper, Workers in the Community Health Centre. Hodder and Stoughton to Judith Crabtree, 25 March 1974, box 24, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. Janet Egan to D. Wren, 25 January 1977, box 24, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. Harper, ‘Guidelines for Writers/Media’. Jan Harper, Girls Can Do Anything; Jan Harper and Sue MacCawley, Report on Assessment of Non-Sexist Materials in a Primary School ca. 1976, box 27, Sugar and Snails Press Collection. Pausacker, Sugar and Snails, 4. Judith, ‘Sexism in Form Two’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 8 (October 1974): 9. Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor, A History of Australian Schooling, 193. Sobski interview. Ibid. Women in Education Group, ‘Statement of Aims’, 6 May 1975, box 33, First Ten Years Collection. ‘Special Study for Women’, The Canberra Times, 11 July 1974, 9. Daniela Torsh, interview by author, 13 May 2014.

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98

Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society, 157. Craig and Proctor, A History of Australian Schooling, 207. On the report’s impact, see also Julie McLeod, ‘The Discovery of Sexism in Schools’, 40, 50–51. Torsh interview. Yates, The Education of Girls, 15–18. Angela Woollacott, ‘Being a Women’s Adviser at the State Level’, 106. Lyn Yates, ‘What Happens When Feminism is an Agenda of the State?’, 18. Dany Humphreys, ‘School and the Oppression of Women’, 241. The chapter was published under her married name. Torsh interview. Dany Torsh and Ken Newcombe, Schools Out!: Verdicts by Australian Children. Ken McKinnon, Statement, 24 July 1974, folder 32, Papers of Daniela Torsh, MS 9147, National Library of Australia (NLA). Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes, Jean Blackburn: Education, Feminism and Social Justice, 206. Torsh interview. Jean Blackburn, circular to the committee, 15 July 1975, folder 33, Papers of Daniela Torsh. Georgina Tsolidis, ‘Difference and Identity’, 52; Yates, The Education of Girls, 98. Currambena School (Sydney), ERA Community School (Melbourne) and the School Without Walls (Canberra) were among those listed as having been consulted during the inquiry. Social Change and the Education of Women, ‘Interim Report of a Committee Enquiring into the Educational Needs of Women’, appendix D, February 1975, folder 33, box 3, Papers of Daniela Torsh. Lyndsay Connors, ‘Time for a Fair Go for Girls’, The Canberra Times, 2 September 1974, 2. Daniela Torsh, ‘Good Morning Boys and Girls’: A Women’s Education Catalogue, 151–54.

99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

On the growth of alternative schools in this period, see Julie McLeod, ‘Experimenting with Education’, 172–89; Anthony Potts, ‘New Education, Progressive Education and the Counter Culture’, 145–49. McLeod, ‘The Discovery of Sexism in Schools’, 41. Currambena, ‘History’. ‘Currumbena’, Mejane, no. 3 (July 1971): 5. Ibid. ‘Films on Issues in Education’, box 33, First Ten Years Collection. There are five entries relating to teachers and students from community schools visiting the centre or organising speakers in 1974 and 1975. Logbooks, 10 April 1974, 19 June 1974, 14 August 1974, 11 March 1975 and 22 May 1975, box 3, Women’s Liberation Centre Collection, 2000.0174/VWLLFA no. 47, UMA. Kristin Green, ‘Sexism and Schools’, Pol, October–November 1974, 36. Biff Macdougall and Harry Oldmeadow, eds., Starting Again, 2. Julia Ryan, ‘Canberra’s School Without Walls, 1973–1997’, 25. ‘Submission for a Canberra Community School: the School Without Walls’, 1973, NLpf 370.112 S941, NLA. Ryan interview. Ryan, ‘Canberra’s School Without Walls’, 27–28. Joel A. Windle, Making Sense of School Choice: Politics, Policies, and Practice Under Conditions of Cultural Diversity,154. Martha Mollison, ‘A Non-Sexist School’, Womanspeak 3, no. 1 (March–April 1977): 22. ‘School Without Walls (SWOW)’, Rouge, no.11 (1981): 15, 20. Pam Waugh and Victoria Foster, ‘Education and the “Down-Girl” Principle’, Refractory Girl, no. 16 (May 1978), 12. Ibid., 13.

Chapter 4 1 2

Penelope Jackson, ‘On Being a Fifteen Year Old Girl’, Liberation, no. 15 (October 1972): 8. Ibid., 9.

3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

‘Female Sexuality & Education’, October 1971, box 11, series 11.16, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. Susan Magarey, ‘The Sexual Revolution as Big Flop’, 26–27. See also Anne Coombs, Sex and Anarchy, ch. 14. On the demand for access to contraception and abortion as premised on women’s right to sexual pleasure, see Rebecca Albury, The Politics of Reproduction: Beyond the Slogans, ch. 3, especially 73– 74. On Indigenous women’s concerns regarding forced abortion and sterilisation, see the discussion later in this chapter. On the development of lesbian feminism in Australia in the 1970s, see Barbara Baird, ‘Lesbian Identities’, 198–200; Rebecca Jennings, Unnamed Desires, 80–90; Reynolds, From Camp to Queer, 140–50; Sophie Robinson, ‘Bar Dykes and Lesbian Feminists’, 52–65. Susan Magarey, ‘Beauty Becomes Political’, 31–44. Gail Mason, ‘Violence’, 337. For example, Jill Julius Matthews, ‘Introduction’, in Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures, xiii. Kate Gleeson, ‘From Suck Magazine to Corporate Paedophilia’, especially 84, 86; Lisa Featherstone, ‘Pleasure, Pain, Power and Politics’, 50–53. Frank Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians, 225. Søren Hansen and Jesper Jensen, The Little Red Schoolbook, 94. Nicole Moore, The Censor’s Library, 284. On the global impact of the text, see Sophie Heywood and Helle Strandgaard Jensen, ‘Exporting the Nordic Children’s ’68’, 1–23. For an overview of the case, see John Sutherland, Offensive Literature, 111–16. ‘School Kids Oz?’, Oz, no. 28 (1970), 4. Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, 211, 353–55. See also Sutherland, Offensive Literature, 117–26. Summers, ‘Free the Children’, 5. Kathie Gleeson, ‘Obscene… But With Literary Merit’, Mejane, no. 7 (April 1972): 5–6. Beverley, ‘Sex: Outside the Laboratory’, Mejane (September 1971):7. The article was a review of a sex manual and exception was taken to its use of expletives in particular.

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Gleeson, ‘Obscene…’, 6. The police raid is also recorded in Wills, ‘Seventies Chronology, Part I’, 404. Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 187. Judy, ‘Learning about Sex’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 8 (October 1974): 10. Kathie, ‘Auto-Eroticism’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 11 (Winter 1975): 8. On the feminist critique of Freud, from an Australian perspective, see Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, 283–87. For a more detailed discussion, see Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution, 87–99. Summers, ‘Free the Children’, 5. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, xv. On the reception of Mitchell’s work in Australian women’s liberation, see Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, 287–90. Greer, The Female Eunuch, 235. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves, 25. For a discussion of this and other examples from the text, see N’JaiAn Elizabeth Patters, ‘Deviants and Dissidents’, 72–75. Patters, ‘Deviants and Dissidents’, 73. ‘Letters to a Stranger!’, Mejane 2, no. 1 (July 1973): 6. Pausacker, Sugar and Snails: A Countersexist Booklist, 11. Ibid., 12. Per Holm Knudsen, How a Baby Is Made; Doctor Duncan Revolution Bookshop, Monthly Book News, ca. 1976, WHCC Pamphlets box, Lespar Library Collection. North Shore Women’s Liberation Newsletter, ca. April 1973, box 8, First Ten Years Collection. Helen Garner, ‘Sexual Liberation?’, 11. ‘1 Down 8 to Go’, 7 April 1975, box 3, series 24.5, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. The protest is also discussed in Henderson and Reid, ‘“It’s Not That Bloody Far from Sydney”’, 163–64. Kieran Tranter, Lyndal Sleep and John Stannard, ‘The Cohabitation Rule’, 705. Jennings, ‘Lesbian Mothers and Child Custody’, 511. Jennings, Unnamed Desires, 89. Noel Ridgway, ‘“It Never Affected Me”: A Look at Sexism in Early Childhood,’ Refractory Girl, no. 13–14 (March 1977): 18.

41 42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

On the importance attached by feminists to masturbation, see Thomas Walter Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 75. Henry Jenkins, ‘The Sensuous Child’, 219. Sunnie Singer, Susan Olderman and Rosemary Maceiras, My Body Feels Good. A copy of the book, purchased from the After Hours Books in Melbourne, is included in box 1, Women’s Liberation Centre Collection. Westbury Street Childcare Centre, ‘Policies’, c. 1978, folder 25, box 55, Halfway House Collection. Under the 1976 amended legislation, the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual acts involving penetration was set at seventeen. For all other sexual acts, the age of consent was sixteen. See Hayley Boxall, Adam M. Tomison and Shann Hulme, Historical Review of Sexual Offence and Child Sexual Abuse Legislation in Australia, 52. On South Australian activists’ responses to the 1972 legislation, see Willett, Living out Loud, 94; Clare Parker, ‘Abortion, Homosexuality and the Slippery Slope’, 174. Boxall, Tomison and Hulme, Historical Review of Sexual Offence and Child Sexual Abuse Legislation, 17. Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians, 283–84. See also Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality, ch. 4, especially 96–97. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 240. Kaye Murray, ‘Touching’, Refractory Girl, no.15 (September 1977): 29. Victorian AUS Women’s Collective, ed., Sexuality, 54. Women’s Liberation Movement, ‘What Every Girl Should Know About Contraception’, North Adelaide, 1971, NLp 613.94 W555, NLA. Kinder, Herstory of the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Movement 1969–1974, 50. Sally E. Gibson, ‘Creating Controversy’, 54–55. Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians, 225. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 2, 33. Women’s Liberation Working Women’s Group, ‘What Every Woman Should Know’, Sydney, 1971, NLpf 613.9430202 W872, NLA. Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 266.

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

‘What Every Woman Should Know’, Mejane, no. 5 (November 1971): 3. ‘Reactions’, Mejane, no.5 (November 1971): 2. ‘What Every Woman Should Know’, 3. ‘Female Sexuality & Education’. ‘Secondary Student Union of WA Press Release’, Liberation Information, September 1973, 5. Stevens, Healing Women, 15, footnote 2. ‘Why Women’s Liberation Published that Pamphlet’, Liberation, no. 7 (October 1971): 3. ‘Lady Greystoke’, Mejane, no. 7 (April 1972): 20. On McClusky’s arrest, see Moore, The Censor’s Library, 294. Liberation Information, September 1973, 4. ‘Why Women’s Liberation Published that Pamphlet’, 2. ‘Why Does the Women Get All the Pain, Miss?’, The Digger, no. 6 (November 1972): 3. For further detail on Garner’s sacking and the response to it, see Brennan, A Writing Life, 28–29; Cath Darcy, ‘What’s in a Name?’, 44–50; and Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth, 94–95. Helen Garner, True Stories, 37. Humphreys, ‘School and the Oppression of Women’, 231. Rosi Braidotti, ‘Remembering Fitzroy High’, 135. Braidotti’s account was included in a collection of essays published in response to the media debate surrounding Garner’s later book, The First Stone (1995). Braidotti, ‘Remembering Fitzroy High’, 121. Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, 94. Young, ‘After the Commission’, 5. Several examples are recorded in the centre’s logbooks. See entries for 14 August 1974, 16 August 1974 and 1 August 1975, Logbooks, box 3, Women’s Liberation Centre Collection. ‘When You Are Woman’, August 1974, folder 5/3, WHCC – Terry 1 box, Lespar Library Collection. Stevens, Healing Women, 48–49. Pausacker, Role Your Own, 14. Ibid., 15.

81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95

Harper, ‘“Role Your Own” Evaluation Study’. On Pausacker’s involvement in lesbian politics, see Willett, Living out Loud, 66–68. On her career as the first publicly gay children’s author in Australia, see Jenny Pausacker, ‘Gay Fiction’. ‘Recommendations to Be Considered by the Conference’, Women’s Health in a Changing Society, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 25–29 August 1975, WHCC – Terry 2 box, Lespar Library Collection. Stevens, Healing Women, 62. Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society, ch. 10. ‘Interim Report of a Committee Enquiring Into the Educational Needs of Women and Girls’, February 1975, 64, folder 33, Papers of Daniela Torsh. Campbell and Hayes, Jean Blackburn, 208. David Widdup, comments on draft report, folder 33, Papers of Daniela Torsh. Manda Biles, Canberra, to Dany Torsh, Sydney, ca. August 1974, folder 45, box 4, Papers of Daniela Torsh. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 1, 124. Jennings, Unnamed Desires, 21, 90–91. Short wrote an account of the events leading up to her dismissal in a subsequent issue of the newspaper: Penny Short, ‘How I Lost My Scholarship’, Arena,27 March 1974. The three cases are discussed in Graham Willett, ‘“Proud and Employed”’, 78–94. On the case of Greg Weir, see also Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, 172–74. Robyn Plaister, interview by Rebecca Jennings, 20 December 2007. Melbourne Gay Teachers and Students Group, Young, Gay, and Proud. On the opposition to the booklet and department response, see Steven Angelides, ‘“The Continuing Homosexual Offensive”’, 178–81; Daniel Marshall, ‘Young, Gay & Proud in Retrospect’, 161–85; Daniel Marshall, ‘Historicizing Sexualities Education’, 23–24.

96 97 98

99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Gay Teachers’ and Students’ Group, ‘Repeal the Direction—No More Censorship’, 1979. The pamphlet was included with the August 1979 edition of the Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter. Marshall, ‘Historicizing Sexualities Education’, 26. On the opposition to Growing Up series, see Stefania Siedlecky, ‘Sex Education in New South Wales’, 114; Wendy McCarthy, Don’t Fence Me In, 117. On the opposition to the MACOS and SEMP courses, see Campbell and Proctor, A History of Australian Schooling, 232–33; Greg Logan, Sex Education in Queensland, 44–47. Festival of Light, ‘Child Care Not Child Abuse!’, pamphlet, 1978, folder 1, Festival of Light Papers, Australian Queer Archives (AQuA), Melbourne. Gail Reekie, ‘History and the Bodies of the Illegitimately Pregnant Woman’, 77. Zora Simic, ‘Fallen Girls?’, 435–436; Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe, Single Mothers and Their Children, 2–3, 204. On the uptake of the pill in Australia, see Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians, 227–235. On the obstacles to underage girls’ access, see Stefania Siedlecky and Diana Wyndham, Populate and Perish, 125– 130. M. Barson and C. Wood, ‘A Survey of the General Practitioner in Family Planning’, 1069. Women’s Liberation Movement, ‘What Every Girl Should Know About Contraception’. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 3, 228. ‘Editorial’, Medical Journal of Australia, 473, cited in Siedlecky and Wyndham, Populate and Perish, 129. ‘Recommendations to be Considered by the Conference’. Judith Allen, Sex & Secrets, 77–80; Barbara Caine, ‘Age of Consent’, 378. On the legal status of abortion in different jurisdictions in this period, see Natasha Cica, ‘Abortion Law in Australia’. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 3, 230.

111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121

122 123 124

125 126

Melbourne Women’s Health Collective, ‘WHC Discussion Paper 2’, Abortion and You: A Collection of Papers from the National Conference on Abortion and Contraception, 14-15 June 1975, Sydney University, WHCC Pamphlets Abortion box, Lespar Library Collection. ‘Girl, 15, Tells of Abortion’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 1976, 2. The case is documented in Karen Coleman, ‘The Politics of Abortion in Australia’, 276. ‘Legal Abortion Threatened’ Mabel, no.3 (April-May 1976): 6. On the Harrold bill, see also Karen Coleman, ‘Discourses on Sexuality’, 262–63. ‘Defend the Liverpool Women’, Mabel, no.2 (March 1976): 3; ‘Legal Abortion Threatened’, 6. ‘Legal Abortion Threatened’, 6. Wills, ‘Seventies Chronology, Part II’, 145. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 3, 230. Arrow, The Seventies, 188. Festival of Light, ‘Child Care Not Child Abuse!’, pamphlet, 1978, folder 1, Festival of Light Papers, AQuA. See also Fred Nile, ‘Controversial Human Relationships Report’, Light (February 1978): 6-7. Cica, ‘Abortion Law in Australia’. See for example, Barbara Baird and Suzanne Belton, ‘Feminism on the Frontier: The History of Abortion Law Reform in 1973 in the Northern Territory, Australia’; Millar, Happy Abortions, 70; MoretonRobinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman, 171. Haebich, Broken Circles, 590–91. Arrow, The Seventies, 21. Bobbi Skyes, ‘Bobbi Skyes’, in Rowland, Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement, 65. On the concerns of the Aboriginal Medical Service, see also Johanna Perheentupa, Redfern: Aboriginal Activism in the 1970s, 155. Arrow, The Seventies, 79. Janet Bacon, ‘Aboriginal Women’, Right to Choose, no. 5 (March 1974): 3.

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

‘Black Women in Society’, Women and Politics Conference, 1975 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1977), vol. 2, 209. ‘Demonstrate Dec 6!!!’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, November 1975, 11. ‘No Forced Sterilization!’, Right to Choose, no. 9 (December 1975): 3. ‘Legalised Abortion and Black Women’s Rights’, Right to Choose, no. 9 (December 1975): 3. ‘Hospitals “Outside Law” on Abortion’, The Age, 13 May 1974, 5. ‘Abortion’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 7 (June–July 1974): 5. ‘Paper Given by Feminist High School Group’, Liberation, no. 37 (1976): 31. Women and Education Group, ‘The Women and Education Group— Aims’, 1975, box 33, First Ten Years Collection. Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society, 119. Monika Allan with Pam Waugh, ‘Talking to Some Purpose: Counter Sexist Strategies in School Counselling’, Radical Education Dossier, no.6 (1978): 11.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

‘Women’s Commission—1973’, press release, 21 February 1973, box 31, First Ten Years Collection. Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 324. For example, Arrow, The Seventies, 71–72; Janet Ramsay, ‘Policy Activism on a “Wicked Issue”’, 247. Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 324–25. ‘Women Against Violence’, 1974, box 31, First Ten Years Collection. Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty; Breckenridge, ‘An Exotic Phenomenon?’, 18–37. Exceptions include Suellen Murray, More Than Refuge, 63–67; and Theobald, Murray and Smart, From the Margins to the Mainstream, especially 41–42. See also Ludo McFerran, ‘The First Ten Years’.

8

9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

The campaign around Parramatta Girls Home, discussed later in this chapter, has received the most attention; see in particular, Bonney Djuric, Abandon All Hope, ch. 8. For a recent discussion of the broader scholarship on activist campaigns for recognition of historical abuse in these institutions, see Katie Wright and Alasdair Henry, ‘Historical Institutional Child Abuse’, 1–13. C. Henry Kempe et al., ‘The Battered-Child Syndrome’, 17–24. On the influence of Kempe’s work in formulating the modern category of child abuse, see Barbara J. Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse, 56–65. Kempe et al., ‘The Battered-Child Syndrome’, 24. L. J. Wurfel and G. M. Maxwell, ‘The “Battered-Child Syndrome” in South Australia’, 127–30; R. Birrell and J. Birrell, ‘The Maltreatment Syndrome in Children’, 1134–38; D. Bialestock, ‘Neglected Babies’, 1129–233. For a discussion of the studies, see Scott and Swain, Confronting Cruelty, 122. Cliff Picton and Peter Boss, Child Welfare in Australia, 128–29. C. Henry Kempe, ‘Keynote Address’, 4–14. Robert Feldman, ‘Are You a Potential Baby Basher?’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 20 August 1975, 4. Arrow, The Seventies, 165–67. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 4, ch. 10. Snitow, ‘Feminism and Motherhood’, 34. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 291. Ti-Grace Atkinson, ‘The Institution of Sexual Intercourse’, 43. Greer, The Female Eunuch, 288, 289. Draft report on the Women Against the Violent Society, box 31, First Ten Years Collection. Nancy and Wendy, ‘Epping Mini-Commission’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, March 1974, 10. Pat, ‘Violence’, Canberra Women’s Liberation Newsletter, April 1974, 6. Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 327. On the funding of refuges, see Sara Dowse, ‘The Bureaucrat as Usurer’, 148–50; Ludo McFerran, ‘Interpretation of a Frontline

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

State’, 191–92. Figures are based on a list compiled by the National Confederation of Women Refuges in September 1976. 6935 children and 5050 women (or a total 11 985 people) stayed at refuges in this period. Overall, children comprised 57.9 per cent of refuge residents nationally. The proportions varied across different refuges, but in all cases, children made up the majority of residents. Submission from the National Confederation of Women’s Refuges, September 1976, box 7, series 8.9, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. Adele Murdolo, ‘Safe Homes for Immigrant and Refugee Women: Narrating Alternative Histories of the Women’s Refuge Movement in Australia’. Gwendolyn Gray Jamieson, Reaching for Health, 68, 331. For an overview of key differences in refuge models, see Jacqui Theobald, ‘The Beginnings of the Victorian Women’s Refuge Movement’. Murray, More Than Refuge, 49–63. Arrow, The Seventies, 72. See for example Tikka Jan Wilson, ‘Feminism and Institutionalized Racism’; Murdolo, ‘Safe Homes for Immigrant and Refugee Women’. Theobald, Murray and Smart, From the Margins to the Mainstream, 30. On the influence of Pizzey, see Zora Simic, ‘From Battered Wives to Domestic Violence’107–26. Jill Tweedie, ‘Beaten-up Women and their Children’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, March 1974, 17. The newsletter states that it was reprinted from the American journal, APHRA: The Feminist Literary Magazine, no. 4 (1973): 19–24. However, Zora Simic identifies Tweedie’s article as having been originally printed in the British feminist journal, Spare Rib. Simic, ‘From Battered Wives to Domestic Violence’, 100, footnote 5. Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 4, 144–45. For further discussion of the study findings, see Arrow, The Seventies, 163–64.

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49

Royal Commission on Human Relationships, Final Report, vol. 4, 145. Ibid., 166. Convenor of the Shelta Women’s Refuge Sub-Committee to Peter Moyle, Department of Health, Canberra, 17 June 1975, box 7, series 8.9, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. ‘Statement of Evidence and Extent of Need’, submission to the Office of Child Care, Department of Social Security, 26 March 1976, box 7, series 8.9, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. Jennings, ‘The Boy-Child in Australian Lesbian Feminist Discourse and Community’, 73. ‘Women’s Liberation Halfway House’, April 1975, Dianne Otto Collection, 2000.0109/VWLLFA no. 8, UMA. ‘Children as Residents’, summary of workshop at the 1st National Women’s Refuges Conference, 3–7 March 1978, folder 1, box 4, Victorian Women’s Refuge Group (VWRG) Collection, 2000.0248/VWLLFA no. 48, UMA. Murray, More Than Refuge, 66. Kosky was part of the founding group of Nardine. Although she was never employed as a worker at the refuge, she volunteered in various capacities, including minding children. See also Murray, ‘Taking Action against Domestic Violence’, 199. ‘Child Care Programme’, ca. May 1975, folder 25, box 21, Halfway House Collection. Handwritten notes from a discussion at Halfway House, no date, folder 18, box 4, Dianne Otto Collection. The date of this discussion is unclear, but the notes are in the same folder as material from the seminar on child maltreatment held at the University of Melbourne in June 1975 and a newspaper clipping from the same month. The paper was reproduced as ‘Child Abuse—A Personal Observation, April 1975’ in Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collective, Herstory of the Halfway House, 110. Ibid., 111. ‘Women and Madness’, paper presented by the Halfway House Collective at the Women and Madness Conference, Melbourne, 9–10

50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

August 1975, folder 8, box 1, Marie Rowan Collection, 2000.0169/VWLLFA no. 68, UMA. Minutes of Roster Women’s Small Group Discussion, 8 April 1975, Dianne Otto Collection. For a broader discussion of class issues at the Halfway House, see Theobald, ‘The Beginnings of the Victorian Women’s Refuge Movement’, 55. ‘Children and the Halfway House Collective’, April 1976, folder 10, box 51, Halfway House Collection. Agenda of the Halfway House/Elsie weekend meeting, 12-13 July 1975, folder 17, box 4, Dianne Otto Collection. Shelta Collective, ‘Aims of the Shelta Collective’, ca. 1976, box 7, series 8.9, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. For example, the statement of aims of the National Confederation of Women’s Refuges referred to the provision of ‘safe and free shelter for women and children’ (emphasis added) as a key objective. National Confederation of Women’s Refuges, statement of aims, ca. 1976, box 7, series 8.9, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. See for example, the activities recorded in Submission from the National Confederation of Women’s Refuges, September 1976, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. Logbook, 18 September and 20 September 1974, box 3, Women’s Liberation Centre Collection. ‘Hobart Women’s Shelter’, October 1979, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. Bob, ‘Elsie Children’s Annex’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, August 1977, 10. ‘Activities at Elsies Womens Refuge’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, November–December 1976, 3. Convener of the Shelta Women’s Refuge Sub-Committee to Peter Moyle, 17 June 1975, box 7, series 8.9, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. ‘Activities at Elsies Womens Refuge’, 3. Murray, More Than Refuge, 43. ‘Running a Refuge’, summary of workshop, National Women’s Refuge Conference, March 1978, folder 1, box 4, VWRG Collection.

64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Betty Hounslow, Heather Saville and Annie Stephenson, Child Care Needs in Women’s Refuges, 17. ‘Child Care and Children in Refuges’, paper by the Victorian Child Care Action Group at the Victorian Women’s Refuge Group State Conference, 26–27 October 1979, folder 6, box 51, Halfway House Collection. ‘Liberation For Everyone’, paper presented at the Children in Refuges Conference, 17 June 1978, Melbourne, folder 9, box 51, Halfway House Collection. ‘Children as Residents’, summary of workshop at the 1st National Women’s Refuges Conference. ‘Kids in Refuges’, Our Kids, Ourselves, no. 3 (1978), folder 1, box 51, Halfway House Collection; ‘Summary—Children in Refuges Conference’, 17 June 1978, folder 1, box 51, Halfway House Collection. Advertisement for the Children in Refuges Conference held on 17 June 1978, folder 11, box 1, Marie Rowan Collection. ‘Liberation For Everyone’, 17 June 1978. ‘Child Care in Victorian Refuges’, paper presented at the Victorian State Women’s Refuge Conference, 29 October 1979, Melbourne, folder 3, box 4, VWRG Collection. ‘The Politics of Child Care’, paper presented at the Victorian State Women’s Refuge Conference, 29 October 1979, folder 10, box 51, Halfway House Collection. ‘Another Look at Children in Refuges: A Discussion Paper’, 6 April 1980, folder 10, box 51, Halfway House Collection. VWRG Child Care Group Newsletter, September 1979, folder 3, box 35, Halfway House Collection. ‘Living at Matilda: Two Kids Speak Out’, VWRG Child Care Group Newsletter, September 1979, folder 3, box 35, Halfway House Collection. ‘International Year of the Child—Melbourne Conference May 17 & 18’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, May 1979, 13. ‘The Kids’ Conference Papers’, 1979, folder 10, box 51, Halfway House Collection. Hounslow, Saville and Stephenson, Child Care Needs,31.

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Ibid., vi, vii. ‘The Kids’ Conference Papers’, 1979, folder 10, box 51, Halfway House Collection. Elizabeth Ward, Father-Daughter Rape, 3. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 3. Scott and Swain, Confronting Cruelty; Lisa Featherstone and Andy Kaladelfos, ‘Hierarchies of Harm’, 306–24. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’. Gerald N. Izenberg, ‘Seduced and Abandoned’, 25–43. One of the best-known critiques was presented in Florence Rush, ‘The Freudian Cover-Up’; and Florence Rush, The Best Kept Secret. Maureen Davies and Liz Pottinger, ‘AWAR Interview Continued’, Sibyl 6, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 18. On Rehfeldt’s work in this area, see also Nancy Rehfeldt and Penelope Hetherington, ‘One Woman’s Crusade’, 139–47. For a review of the literature on the feminist project of ‘rediscovery’ and subsequent revisions, see Yorick Smaal, ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse, Part 1’, 704–05. Florence Rush, ‘The Sexual Abuse of Children’, 73–74. For a discussion of the paper and its reception see Nancy Whittier, The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse, 23–24. Suzanne Bellamy, ‘Child Rape’, Mejane, no. 10 (March 1973): 10. Suzanne Bellamy, ‘Guthrie, Bessie Jean Thompson (1905–1977)’. On Guthrie, see also Lorena Allam, ‘Creating a Space: The Life of Bessie Guthrie’, Hindsight, ABC Radio National, 28 October 2007. Mejane Collective, untitled, Mejane, no.8 (August 1972): 13. For previous discussions of the campaign, see Bellamy, ‘Guthrie’; Djuric, Abandon All Hope, ch. 8. Bellamy, ‘Child Rape’, 10. ‘Call for Inquiry on “Brutality” at Homes’, The Telegraph, 23 July 1973, 21. Reproduced in ‘Protest’, 1973, box 44, First Ten Years Collection. Djuric, Abandon All Hope, 125–26.. ‘Protest’, 1973; see also ‘Protest Over Girls’ Homes’, Tribune, 11–17 December 1973, 3.

98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

Mejane Collective, untitled, 13; ‘Virginity Test on Girls “An Outrage”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 1973. On the history of the practice of virginity testing, see Peter E. Quinn, ‘Unenlightened Efficiency’, 312–14, 324–25. ‘The Child Welfare Campaign’, Mejane 2, no. 2 (April 1974): 26. ‘Out of the 16,000 Men and Women’, 1974, box 44, First Ten Years Collection. ‘Girls Bashed’, Tribune, 13 November 1973, 6. A new institution for girls, Kamballa, opened on 31 October 1974 on the Parramatta site. Naomi Parry, ‘Kamballa (1974–1983)’. Sharon, ‘Winberra Girls Rec’n Centre’, Vashti’s Voice, no.7 (June– July 1974): 6. Misspelling of the centre’s name is in the original source. ‘Women in Theatre: The WTG’, Farrago, 17 September 1976. Marg O’Donnell, ‘Girls in Conflict with the Law’, 11 April 1978, box 8, series 8.11, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. On the formation and activities of Justice for Juveniles, see Helen Gregory, Giving Youth a Voice, 9–10. Summers, Ducks on the Pond, 324. Jamieson, Reaching for Health, 76–77. ‘Second Rape Crisis Centre Opens’, The Australian, 25 November 1974, 3; Jamieson, Reaching for Health, 76–79. Mary Spongberg, ‘Rape’, 262. Joseph E. Davis, Accounts of Innocence, 79–80. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 33. Ibid., 597. James Cunningham, ‘A Woman Who Changed Her Mind About Rape’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 1976, 3. ‘News from the Rape Crisis Collective’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, November–December 1976, 9. Statistics on the perpetrator were not disaggregated by age group. However, of all the cases seen by the centre, in twenty-three cases, the perpetrator was recorded as being the father of the victim and in twenty-nine cases another relative. In some cases, the perpetrator may not have been an adult. ‘Sydney Rape Crisis Statistics’, October

116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

1974–September 1977, Women’s Community Action Group 3 box, Lespar Library Collection. Jocelynne A. Scutt, Even in the Best of Homes, 67. Viv, ‘Rape Action’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 26 (September 1979): 31. Australian Women Against Rape, ‘A Speak Out Against Rape and Sexual Abuse’, Sibyl 5, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 2. The AWAR WA and Sydney Rape Crisis studies are discussed in Scutt, Even in the Best of Homes, 67–68. ‘Incest: The Hidden Crime Brought into the Open’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 30 April 1980, 19. Breckenridge, ‘An Exotic Phenomenon?’, 27–31. ‘Hobart Women’s Shelter’, October 1979, 39, box 18, series 16.21, Records of the Brisbane Women’s House. The refuge’s history is recorded in more detail in Anne Collins and Jane Dunsford, A House Full of Women. For a summary, see Caroline Evans, ‘Annie Kenney Young Women’s Refuge (1978–2009)’. ‘Hobart Women’s Shelter’, 45. Henderson and Reid, ‘“It’s Not That Bloody Far from Sydney”’, 162. Taylor, Brazen Hussies, 653–54. ‘Young Women’s Refuge Collective’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, September 1979, 4. Evans, ‘Annie Kenney Young Women’s Refuge (1978–2009)’. Steven Angelides, ‘Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality’, 142. See also Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality, ch. 3. Steven Angelides, ‘The Emergence of the Paedophile in the Late Twentieth Century’, 286. ‘The Moral C.I.A.’, Mabel, no.1 (December 1975): 8. For a detailed discussion of FoL’s response to IYC, see Isobelle Barrett Meyering, ‘Children’s Rights, the Family and “Sexual Permissiveness”’, 360–65. Mary Warnock, ‘Whitehouse [née Hutcheson], (Constance) Mary (1910–2001), schoolteacher and campaigner’,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Fred Nile, Fred Nile: An Autobiography, 90.

134 135 136 137 138 139

Festival of Light, ‘Child Care Not Child Abuse!’, pamphlet, 1978, folder 1, Festival of Light Papers, AQuA. Ian Warden, ‘About Pies, the Crusade and Conspiracy’, The Canberra Times, 27 September 1978, 3. ‘Whitehouse = Repression’, pamphlet, September 1978, Campaign Against Repression Canberra Papers, AQuA. ‘International Total Child-Care Conference’, GAYTAS, no. 7, July 1979, 7. Child Care Action Group, ‘F.O.L.’s Follies!’, September 1979, Campaign Against Repression Melbourne Papers, AQuA. ‘Keep It In the Family’, Rouge, no. 1 (June 1979): 16–17.

Afterword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

Suzanne Franzway and Jane Lowe, ‘Children and Families’, Refractory Girl, no. 20–21 (October 1978): 71. ‘Minding the Child’, The Canberra Times, 1 January 1979, 2. Arrow, The Seventies, 112. Barrett Meyering, ‘Children’s Rights, the Family and “Sexual Permissiveness”’, 356–60. See also: Catherine Kevin, ‘Maternity and Freedom’, 6. ‘Mar 31 Abortion Rally’, Sibyl 6, no. 1 (1979), 7. ‘General Meeting 25/6/78’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, July 1978, 13. ‘CLIYC’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, December 1978– January 1979, 6. ‘Political’, Lesbian Newsletter, no. 17, May 1979, 2. Campaign Against Repression, ‘International Year of the Child: A Celebration of Hypocrisy’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1979, 13–15; ‘A Comment on the Above’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1979, 15; Campaign Against Repression, ‘International Year of the Con’, Vashti, no. 25 (Winter 1979): 26. International Year of the Child Unit, Catalogue of National Events and Projects in Australia, Department of Social Security, Canberra, July 1979, series C2544, National Archives of Australia.

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26 27

‘Who’s Kidding Who in the Year of the Child?’, 1979, box 16, First Ten Years Collection. ‘Open Letter to the IYC National Conference’, 16–19 March 1979, folder 9, box 51, Halfway House Collection, UMA. ‘Who’s Kidding Who in the Year of the Child?’. ‘Year of the Child’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1979, 11. ‘Women and Children First!’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, January 1979, 3. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, 13. On Rich as a ‘turning point’ in second-wave feminist thought on motherhood, see Snitow, ‘Feminism and Motherhood’, 38; Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived, 122–24. Rich, Of Woman Born, 174. Ibid., 18. Lyn Drummond, ‘“Total Break-up” of Aboriginal Family’, The Canberra Times, 19 March 1979, 1. On Dyer’s work during IYC, see also Fiona Davis, ‘Kooris, Ghubbas and Others’, 85. ‘June 9th-10th Conference Report’, Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, August 1979, 3. Rowbotham has made a similar point about the British movement; see Sheila Rowbotham, ‘To Be or Not to Be’, 84. ‘Women and Children Discussion Group’, Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter, June 1979. Meredith Quinn, ‘What’s the Matter with Kids Today?’, Refractory Girl, no. 20–21 (October 1980): 18. Barbara Wishart, ‘Motherhood Within Patriarchy: A Radical Feminist Perspective’, paper presented at the Women and Labour Conference, Adelaide, June 1982, box 1, Zelda D’Aprano Collection, 2000.0231/VWLLFA no. 67, UMA. See for example, Curthoys, ‘Doing It for Themselves’, 438–45; Katy Reade, ‘The Discourses of Crisis’, 125–45. ‘Gendered Impact of COVID-19’. ‘Children’s Commissioner Outlines Key Priorities as She Begins Her New Role (2013)’. Australian Human Rights Commission, Children’s Rights in Australia: A Scorecard, 8.

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Periodicals Arena (Sydney) Australian Left Review (national) Canberra Women’s Liberation Newsletter Cauldron (Sydney) Dissent (Melbourne) Farrago (Melbourne)

Lesbian Newsletter (Melbourne) Liberation (Adelaide) Liberation Information (Perth) Light (national) Mabel (Sydney) Mejane (Sydney) Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter New York Magazine North Shore Women’s Liberation Group Newsletter (Sydney) On Dit (Adelaide) Our Kids, Ourselves (Melbourne) Oz (London) Pol (national) Queensland Teachers Journal Queensland Women’s Liberation Newsletter Radical Education Dossier (Sydney) Refractory Girl (national) Right to Choose (national) Rouge (national) Scarlet Woman (national) Sibyl (Perth) Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter The Age (Melbourne) The Australian The Australian Women’s Weekly The Canberra Times The Digger (Melbourne) The Examiner (Hobart) The Mercury (Hobart) The Sydney Morning Herald Tribune (national) Vashti’s Voice (Melbourne) Womanspeak (Sydney) Women’s Liberation (Brisbane)

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Index

Aboriginal people see Indigenous people abortion anti-abortion politics 12, 34–5, 121, 126, 161, 165 centrality to second-wave feminism 11, 12, 16, 101, 126 children’s role in abortion protests 34–5, 128 forced 16–17, 101, 126–8 International Year of the Child as anti-abortion platform 12, 165 teenage girls’ access to 123–6 abuse see domestic violence and child abuse; sexual violence and sexual abuse Adelaide Women’s Liberation 7, 23, 53, 113 adolescence see childhood; children ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ 150 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape 156–7 age of consent see underage sex Alison and the Bear 87 Allan, Monika 129 alternative schools see education; Falcon St Alternative High; Guriganya Community School; School Without Walls; Sydney Road Community School

Altman, Dennis 28 Amazon Acres 70 anarchism 9 Anderson, Jim 103 Angelides, Steven 159 Annie Kenney Young Women’s Refuge 158–9 Ansara, Martha 96 anti-child stereotype 6, 10–13 archives, use in research 8–9, 18–19 Ariès, Philippe 14, 24–5 Arrow, Michelle 7, 46, 126, 134 artificial reproduction 2, 30–1 Atkinson, Ti-Grace 135 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 40, 112, 153 Australian Labor Party 92, 125 see also Whitlam, Gough Australian Medical Association 125 Australian Schools Commission 87, 91–2, 93–4, 119–20, 129 Australian Women Against Rape 151, 156, 157–8 Australian Women’s Broadcasting Cooperative 112 Australian Women’s Education Coalition 92 The Australian Women’s Weekly 87, 158 Bacon, Janet 127 Bacon, Wendy 103 Baird, Barbara 6 Barltrop, Carole 95 Bassett, Jan 117 Bathie, Judith 87 battered child syndrome 133–5 see also domestic violence and child abuse Baxandall, Rosalyn 11, 25 Bebbington, Laurie 119 Bellamy, Suzanne 31–2, 79, 151–3 Biles, Manda 119–20 Birthrights: A Bill of Rights for Children 27–8 bisexual women see lesbians and bisexual women Black Women’s Action Group 127

Blackburn, Jean 93–4, 119 Bongiorno, Frank 102 Bowlby, John 50–1 Box Hill Women’s Liberation Group 33, 81 see also Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative boys see also children; men exercising male privilege 98 mothers of 81, 82, 83, 85, 141 presence in women’s spaces 22, 38, 70, 140–1, 146, 148 see also refuges Bradley, Denise 84–5, 92 Braidotti, Rosi 116–17 Brennan, Deborah 46, 59 Brisbane High School Feminist Group 42, 128–9 Brisbane Women’s Liberation 7, 115 Brownmiller, Susan 156–7 Campaign Against Repression 165–6 Campbell, Craig 91 Campo, Natasha 11 Canberra Women’s Liberation 7, 15, 29, 49, 61, 97, 127 censorship and information controls see sexuality Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life 24 child abuse see child sexual abuse; domestic violence and child abuse child care see also communal households; maternal role; paternal role community or collective-controlled 45–8, 59–62 governmental support 55, 61–2 improving 45–7, 56–62, 146–7 liberating children 55–6, 58–9, 82–3, 110, 146–7 liberating women 46, 53–6 providing 35–8, 45–7, 53–8 race and class in relation to 16, 47, 57, 59–60 in refuges 145–7 in women’s centres 35–8 Child Care Act 1972 55 Child Care Action Group 54 Child Care Working Group 147, 148

‘Child Rape’ 151–2 child sexual abuse see also paedophilia balancing sexual liberation and protection 159–60, 163 counselling and support 156–7 girls abused by male relatives 149–52, 157–8, 162 raising awareness of 149–51, 152–3, 157–8, 162–3 refuges for victims 158–9 studies on 157–8 in welfare institutions 151–3, 155 childhood history of 23–4, 25 see also Ariès, Philippe and the notion of innocence 5–6, 106, 111, 166 as a social construct 13–14, 25–6 children see also anti-child stereotype; child abuse; child care; children’s books; education; high school activism; sex-role socialisation; sexuality; violence; welfare institutions attendance at protests 33–5, 54, 128 challenges in ‘recovering’ children’s voices 19 political awareness and empowerment of 6, 31–3, 38–44, 128, 145, 148, 173–4 views of 31–2, 42, 43, 68, 77–8, 100, 114, 119–20, 148–9 at women’s centres 34–8, 41, 42, 96 ‘Children and Liberation’ 31–2, 79 Children in Refuges Conference 147 children’s books 74, 84–9, 107, 118 Chiswick women’s shelter 138 Clarke, Bill 43 Clarke, Jocelyn 119 class child care and 47, 57, 60 in children’s books 88 education and 95–6 parental roles and 13, 65 participation in women’s liberation movement and 14–15 in refuges 143 sex-role socialisation and 77

surveillance of children’s activities and 26 welfare institutions and 154–5 Clohesy, Michael 120 Comer, Lee 50–1 ‘Coming Out’ radio show 112 communal households see also child care challenging social structures 72 child-free 70–1 children’s views on 68 emotional complications 71 financial necessity and 69 maintaining pressure on women 67–8 origins of 53 practice and advocacy 66–9 women-only 69–70 communism 45, 68, 82, 104, 115 Community Child Care Co-operative NSW 62 Community Controlled Child Care 60–1, 62 Compulsory Miseducation 28, 79 consent see sexual violence and sexual abuse; underage sex conservative politics 11, 160, 164–7 see also Festival of Light; Liberal Party contraception see also sterilisation increasing access to 11, 100–1, 122–3 teenagers and 100, 113, 115–16, 122–3, 127 corporal punishment 91, 136 see also domestic violence and child abuse country see rural women’s communes COVID-19 172 Crabtree, Judith 88 Craney, Anna 78 ‘cultural renaissance’ 7–8, 84 Currambena school 95 Curthoys, Ann 47, 64 Curthoys, Jean 9 Dale, Rae 64

Damned Whores and God’s Police 23, 104–5 Dansky, Steven 51 Davies, Rebecca 114 De Leo, Maria 43 Deschooling Society 28, 59, 79–80 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution on child sexuality 26, 111 on class 26 dissemination and impact 1–2, 22, 24–5, 29–31, 45, 167–8 on liberated parenting 84 on mutual oppression of women and children 1–2, 25–7, 78–9, 167–8 on race 25, 26 on reproduction and pregnancy 2, 30–1, 167–8 on schooling 26, 29 on sex-role socialisation 78–9 Digger 116 Dixon, Suzanne 82 Doctor Duncan Bookshop 107 Documentary Theatre 155 domestic violence and child abuse see also refuges; sexual violence and sexual abuse laws regarding child abuse 134 maternal violence 134–6, 141–3 medical approaches to child abuse 133–5 paternal violence 138–41 during pregnancy 142 raising awareness of 131–3 Royal Commission on Human Relationships 134 sex-role socialisation and perpetuation of violence 137, 140 Women Against the Violent Society forum 131–2, 135 domesticity 11–13, 47 see also maternal role; nuclear family; paternal role; sex-role socialisation Donaldson, Beryl 67 ‘Down with Sexist Upbringing’ 80–1 Dowse, Sara 29 Duncan, Karen 108–9

Dunstan, Don 92 Dyer, Mollie 17, 169 Eatock, Pat 15, 127 economic inequality see class education see also Australian Schools Commission; high school activism; sex education in schools; sex-role socialisation; universities alternative schools 93, 94–8 dividing childhood and adulthood 24 feminist high school groups 42 feminist literature and media in schools 40–1 feminist teachers 40, 73, 89–91 Firestone’s critique of schooling 26, 29 government reporting and measures to reduce sexism in 91–2, 119, 129 radical education theory 28, 79–80, 93, 94 school visits by women’s liberation activists 38–9 treatment of female teaching staff 90 treatment of pregnant teenagers at school 128–9 women’s studies 7, 40, 97 ‘The Effeminist Manifesto’ 51 Egan, Janet 89 Ellis, Julie 23, 58 Elsie Women’s Refuge collective decision-making 137 domestic violence study 139–40 establishment of 131, 136–7 focus on children’s rights 144, 145, 146 employment conditions for female teachers 90 women’s opportunities for 12, 53–5 Engels, Friedrich 52 Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children 27–8 ethnicity 25 see also Indigenous people; migrants; white women Ewin, Penny 54 Falcon St Alternative High 97–8

family see children; domesticity; maternal role; nuclear family; paternal role Family Action Movement 160 Family Planning Association 114 Farson, Richard 27–8 Father-Daughter Rape 150 fatherhood see paternal role Faulkner, Joanne 5 The Female Eunuch 24, 40, 49, 50, 66, 76 Female Sexuality and Education 114 The Feminine Mystique 48–9, 135 feminism see second-wave feminism ‘Feminism and Kids’ 169 ‘feminist amnesia’ 9 Feminist Press 85 Feminist Teachers Group see Women in Education Group femocracy 8, 9, 46 Ferguson, Deirdre 65, 82 Festival of Light 121, 126, 160–2, 165 Firestone, Shulamith 1–2, 13, 24–5 see also The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution Fitzroy High School 116–17 forced abortion and sterilisation 16–17, 101, 126–8 Foster, Victoria 97 Fraser, Malcolm 12, 61, 92, 164 ‘Free the Children’ 22–4, 78–9 Freire, Paulo 28, 79 Freud, Sigmund 105–6, 150–1 Friedan, Betty 48–9, 135 ‘Functions of the Family’ 53 Garner, Helen 68–9, 71, 108, 116–17 gay liberation 7, 28, 51, 165 see also homosexuality; lesbians and bisexual women Gay Teachers and Students Group 121 Geikie, Alva 38

gender see men; women gender-role socialisation see sex-role socialisation Gerster, Robin 117 Gibbeson, Christina 139–40 Gillett, Judy 45 girls see also children; women education activism and 91–94 feminist high school groups 42 mothers of 33, 71, 78, 81, 97, 106–7, 172 sex education initiatives aimed at 113–16, 117–18, 120 sexual abuse of 149–53, 158–9 teenage pregnancy and abortions 121–9 welfare activism and 151–6, 159 Girls, School and Society 91–2, 93–4, 119–20, 129 Girls Can Do Anything 86, 89 Glebe Group 21, 54 Gleeson, Kathie 51, 104 ‘Good Morning Boys and Girls’: A Woman’s Education Catalogue 94 Goodman, Paul 28, 79 Gordon, Kathie 58–9 Gordon, Linda 53 Gorton, John 54–5 Gray, Lesley 56–7 Greer, Germaine 40, 50, 66, 104, 106, 135 see also The Female Eunuch Gross, Louise 58 Guriganya Community School 96 Guthrie, Bessie 152, 153 Halfway House see Women’s Liberation Halfway House Handyside, Richard 103 Harper, Jan 33, 35, 64, 65, 81, 86, 89 Harper, Robin 33 Hayden, Bill 109 The High Rise Gang 88 high school activism 41–2, 78, 96, 173 higher education see universities Hobart Women’s Shelter 158

Holt, John 27–8 homelessness see refuges; welfare institutions Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation 28 homosexuality see also lesbians and bisexual women debates on age of consent 111 laws regarding 111 in sex education and children’s books 107, 118–21 societal equation with paedophilia 120, 160–2 teacher dismissals due to 120 Honour and Other People’s Children 71 housewives see domesticity How a Baby is Made 107 Huggins, Jackie 13 Hurstville Women’s Liberation Group 51, 85 Illich, Ivan 28, 79–80 immigration see migrants in vitro fertilisation (IVF) 31 incest 149–52, 157–8 see also child sexual abuse Indigenous people child care and 17, 47, 59 child removal and Stolen Generations 16, 169 domestic motherhood and 13 educational policies on 93–4 in refuges 137–8 role in women’s liberation 14–17 sexuality and reproductive rights 16–17, 108–9, 126–8 in welfare institutions 154–5 withholding of benefit payments 108–9 Innes, Sylvia 73 Innovations Program 91, 94 International Bookshop 104 International Total Child Care Conference 162 International Women’s Day 33–4, 57, 125, 131 International Women’s Year conferences during 17, 119

funding for 40, 64, 87, 92, 118, 165 International Year of the Child conservative politics and 12, 161, 164–7 funding 164–5 mainstream approach to 166 women’s liberation’s approach to 164–70 intersectionality see class; homosexuality; race interviews, use in reseach 18 IVF (in vitro fertilization) 31 Jackson, Penelope 100 Jennings, Rebecca 109 Journal of the American Medical Association 133 Karmel Report 91, 119 Karrala House 155 ‘Keep It in the Family’ 162 Kempe, Henry 133–5 Kensington Women’s Group Child Care Co-operative 60–1 Kids’ Conference 148–9 King, Sue 69, 70 Knoebel, John 51 Knudsen, Per Holm 107 Kosky, Michelle 141 labour rights 14 Laing, R.D. 28–9, 79 Lake, Marilyn 5, 18 Leahy, Gillian 10 left-wing politics see also Australian Labor Party; communism; socialism origins of women’s liberation and 8–9, 14 in relation to children’s liberation 3–4, 28–9 Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre 37–8, 117 Lesbian Mothers Group 62 lesbians and bisexual women in children’s books 107, 118

as mothers 62, 65, 109 sex and 101, 118 as students and teachers 109, 119–20 LGBTQIA 172, 173 see also homosexuality Liberal Party 54–5, 164 see also Fraser, Malcolm; Gorton, John; McMahon, William liberation see children; women Liberation 30, 58, 100 Lilith, Robyn 109 The Little Red Schoolbook 103–4 Liverpool Women’s Health Centre 124–5 lockdowns 172 Lovell, Kera 42 Lusher, Stephen 165 Lynch, Lesley 56–7 Mabel 125, 160–1 Macdougall, Biff see Ward, Biff Macdougall, Genny 32 MacEwan, Phyllis 58 Magarey, Susan 9 Manning, Peter 153 Mardi Gras parade 161 masturbation 110 Maternal Care and Mental Health 50–1 maternal role see also anti-child stereotype; child care; communal households; domestic violence and child abuse; nuclear family; reproduction; sex-role socialisation as basis of women and children’s shared oppression 1–2, 27, 48–51 feminist perception of 1–2, 4, 11–13, 30, 48–9, 167–72 imbalance in childrearing tasks 172 maternal violence 134–6, 141–3 McCaughey, Winsome 60 McClusky, Claire 115 McKinnon, Ken 91, 93 McLeod, Julie 94

McMahon, William 55 Medical Journal of Australia 122, 123 Mejane on child care 56, 59, 66–7 on The Dialectic of Sex 1, 29 on education 95 on sex-role socialisation 31–2, 77–9 on sexual abuse 151–2 on sexuality 104, 106, 114 on Sydney Women’s Liberation 21 Melbourne Feminist Collection 108 Melbourne Women’s Health Collective 124 Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group 155 men see also paternal role as child-care workers in women’s refuges 145–6 men’s liberation 51 middle class see class migrants child care and 47, 59–60, 61 in children’s books 88 education and 15, 93–4, 96, 117 role in women’s liberation 14–15 sex-role socialisation and 77 sexuality and 117, 118 at women’s centres 38, 118 women’s refuges and 137–8, 149 Millar, Erica 34 Minors (Property and Contracts) Act 1970 (NSW) 124 Mitchell, Juliet 50, 106 Mitchell, Megan 173 Monkey Grip 68, 108 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 16 Mortimer, Mary 84–5 motherhood see maternal role ‘The Motherhood Myth’ 50–1 ‘Motherhood Within Patriarchy’ 169

Ms. 43, 77, 80–1 Murawina preschool and child-care centre 17, 47 Murray, Suellen 141 My Body Feels Good 110 Nardine refuge 141, 146 National Centre for the Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect 134 National Conference on Abortion and Contraception 123 National Council of Aboriginal and Islander Women 17 National Women’s Refuge Conference 141, 146 Neighbourhood Children’s Centre 110 Neville, Richard 103 new feminism see second-wave feminism New York Radical Feminists 151 Newcombe, Ken 93 Newmeyer, Henry 123 Nicholson, Joyce 75–6 Notes from the Second Year 135 nuclear family 25–7, 29–30, 45, 48–53 see also children; domesticity; maternal role; paternal role; sex-role socialisation abuse in 134–5, 138, 142–3, 162–3 constructing childhood 24 deconstructing see communal households International Year of the Child promotes 164 race and 16 reinforcement of sex roles and heterosexuality in 28, 78–9, 81–2 sexual repression in 105 women and children as property 14, 25, 48, 52–3 nudity 110 O’Donnell, Marg 155–6 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 167–8 Office of Child Care 60, 148 On Dit 22, 104–5 oral contraceptives 12, 122 oral history, use in research 18

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 52 O’Shane, Pat 16 The Other Half: Women in Australian Society 51, 67, 93 Our Bodies, Ourselves 106, 109 Oz 103–4 paedophilia 111, 120, 160–2 see also child sexual abuse parental role see maternal role; paternal role Parents 64 Parramatta Girls Home 153, 155 Parsons, Talcott 76 paternal role see also child care; communal households; domestic violence and child abuse; nuclear family; reproduction; sex-role socialisation barriers to participation in child care 64–5 increased focus on 51–2, 63–5 paternal violence 138–40, 149–52, 157–8 Patters, N’Jai-An Elizabeth 106 Pausacker, Jenny 87, 88, 89, 107, 118 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 28, 79 pedophilia 111, 120, 160–2 see also child sexual abuse personal testimony, use in research 18 Perth Women’s Abortion Action Group 165 Perth Women’s Liberation 7, 114 the pill 12, 122 Pitchford, Kenneth 51 Plaister, Robyn 120 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin 80–1 Pol 96 politics see conservative politics; left-wing politics ‘The Politics of Child Care’ 147 pregnancy 2, 142 see also abortion; contraception teenage 121–9 Proctor, Helen 91 Psychoanalysis and Feminism 106 publications, use in research 8–9, 18–20

Queensland Teachers’ Union 73 queer identity see homosexuality; LGBTQIA Quinn, Meredith 71–2, 169 race 25 see also Indigenous people; migrants; white women Radical Education Dossier 129 rape see sexual violence and sexual abuse records, use in research 8–9, 18–20 Reekie, Gail 121 Refractory Girl on children in communal households 71, 169 on children’s books 85 on education 98 on race 16 on sexuality 110, 112 refuges see also Elsie Women’s Refuge; Shelta women’s refuge; welfare institutions; Women’s Liberation Halfway House acceptance of boys 140–1 child care in 145–7 children’s rights in 132, 144–9 establishment of 136–7 focus on nuclear family 138, 143 race and 15, 137–8, 149 residential control in 137–8, 141, 143–4, 146–7 for sexual abuse victims 158–9 violence in 137, 140–4 Rehfeldt, Nancy 151 Reid, Elizabeth 61, 91 reproduction 2, 30–1 see also abortion; contraception; maternal role; paternal role; pregnancy; sterilisation Rich, Adrienne 167–8 Ridgway, Noel 78, 110 Right to Choose 127–8 right-wing politics 160, 164–7 see also Festival of Light; Liberal Party Robertson, Mavis 67–8 Robertson, Peter 68

Role Your Own 40–1, 118 Rouge 162 Rowbotham, Sheila 55 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse 6 Royal Commission on Human Relationships 120, 122, 125–6, 134, 139–40 rural women’s communes 69–70 Rush, Florence 151 Ryan, Edna 31 Ryan, Julia 30, 66, 68, 97 Ryan, Lyndall 30 Safe Schools program 173 Sampson, Shirley 92 Scarlet Woman 83 school see education School Without Walls 96–8 ‘The Schoolkids Issue’ (Oz magazine) 103–4 Schools Commission see Australian Schools Commission Schools Out!: Verdicts by Australian Children 93 Secondary Student Union of Western Australia 114–15 Secondary Students Group 42, 128 second-wave feminism see femocracy; International Women’s Year; women; Women’s Electoral Lobby; women’s liberation Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care 17 sex education in schools activists providing material, talks and courses 113–18 conservative groups’ resistance to 121, 160, 165 Helen Garner at Fitzroy High School 116–17 homosexuality in 118–21 introduction to curriculum 113 school students’ views on 42, 114, 119–20, 173 ‘Sex Education, The School and Your Child’ 160 ‘Sex: Outside the Laboratory’ 104 Sexism and Schooling Conference 42, 128 sex-role socialisation see also domesticity; maternal role; paternal role child-care centre policies on 83

children’s books and 74, 84–9 children’s interviews evidencing 31–2 consciousness-raising groups 77 development of literature on 75–6, 79–80 dilemmas in resisting 74, 83–4, 89, 98–9 domestic violence and 140, 142 nuclear family as foundation of 78–9, 81–2 race and class in relation to 77 at school 32, 43–4, 73–4, 77–8, 89–99 sexual abuse and 151, 158 in welfare institutions 154 sexual violence and sexual abuse 101–2, 131, 156–7 see also child sexual abuse; refuges sexuality see also homosexuality; reproduction; sex education in schools; sexual violence and sexual abuse; underage sex assumption of childhood asexuality 5, 26, 27, 28, 105 balancing liberation and protection of children 5–6, 101, 112, 159–60, 163 children’s sexual activity with others 110–12 masturbation 110 objectification of women and girls 42, 101 parenting influencing 105–10, 112 publishing and censorship regarding 103–4, 115–17, 121, 161 of women 27, 100–1, 108–9, 112 Sexuality 112 Shelston, Gail 40 Shelta women’s refuge 140, 145–6 Short, Penny 120 Sibyl 63, 151 single mothers 61, 63, 65, 69, 108–9 Skyes, Roberta (Bobbie) 127 Snitow, Ann 11, 134 Sobski, Jozefa 90 socialism see also communism influence within women’s liberation 9, 14 socialist critiques of the nuclear family 45, 48, 50, 52

socioeconomic status see class Soutter, Alison 80 Spain, Daphne 36 St Kilda Women’s Liberation Group 83 sterilisation, forced 16–17, 101, 126–8 Stevens, Joyce 67–8, 115 Stolen Generations 16, 169 straw feminism see anti-child stereotype Sugar and Snails Press see Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative Summers, Anne 23–4, 30, 104–5, 106, 131, 137 see also ‘Free the Children’ supporting mother’s benefit 69, 108–9, 122 Sydney Rape Crisis Centre 156, 158 Sydney Road Community School 96 Sydney Women’s Commission 39, 43, 131 Sydney Women’s Liberation 7, 21, 165 see also Glebe Group; Hurstville Women’s Liberation Group Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter 138 teenagers see children testimony, use in research 18 This Day Tonight 40, 153 The Three Dragons 88 Torsh, Daniela 91–2, 93–4, 116 Troll 104 Umansky, Lauri 10 Unbecoming Men: A Men’s Consciousness-raising Group Writes on Oppression and Themselves 51 underage sex see also child sexual abuse contraception and 100, 113, 115–16, 122–3, 127 debates on age differences in sexual activity 110–12 ‘exposure to moral danger’ charge 153, 155–6 teenage pregnancy and abortions 121–9 virginity tests 153, 155–6

universities 7, 12, 54, 57, 80 University of Melbourne 54 University of Sydney 57 University of Western Australia 54 upper class see class Vashti’s Voice on Monkey Grip 69 on the nuclear family 79 on sex-role socialisation 43, 77, 90 on sexuality 105, 155 on welfare institutions 155 Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency 17, 169 Victorian Australian Union of Students (AUS) Women’s Collective 112 Victorian Women’s Refuge Group 147, 148 Victorian Women’s Refuges Conference 147–8 violence 131, 135, 156 see also domestic violence and child abuse; sexual violence and sexual abuse Voices from Women’s Liberation 58 Walker, Frank 125 Ward, Biff communal households 66–7, 68 on The Dialectic of Sex 1–2, 29 on father-daughter rape 149–50 School Without Walls 97 Waugh, Pam 98–9 Wearing, Betsy 62–3, 64, 65, 69 Weir, Greg 120 welfare institutions see also refuges abuse in 132, 151–3, 155 closures 155 race and class in relation to 154 reasons for entry 153–6 sex-role socialisation in 154 Westbury Street Childcare Centre 83, 110

What Children Do 109 What Every Girl Should Know About Contraception 113, 122 What Every Woman Should Know About Contraception 114, 115 What Society Does to Girls 75–6 Wheelahan, Elizabeth 128 White, Denise 123 white women, foregrounding of in children’s books 88 in refuges 138, 149 regarding abortion 126–8 regarding child care 47, 60 regarding sex education 117 regarding sex-role socialisation 77, 93–4 in women’s liberation 13, 14–16, 19, 168–9 Whitehouse, Mary 161–2 Whitlam, Gough 8, 61, 92, 126, 134, 137, 156 see also International Women’s Year ‘Who’s Kidding Who in the Year of the Child?’ 166, 167 Widdup, David 119 Wiley Park Girls High School 39, 117 Wilson Youth Hospital 155–6 Winbirra Reception Centre 155 Winlaton institution 155 Wishart, Barbara 169 The Witch of Grange Grove 86–7 Womanspeak 43, 65 women see anti-child stereotype; education; maternal role; sex-role socialisation; sexuality; violence Women Against the Violent Society forum 131, 135, 156 Women and Children Discussion Group 169 Women and Girls: Our Experiences in the Schools forum 43 Women and Labour Conference (1982) 169 Women and Madness Conference 142 Women and Politics Conference 17, 127 Women in Education Group 90–1, 97, 129 ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ 50

Women Who Want to Be Women 12 Women’s Abortion Action Campaign 126–8 Women’s Abortion Action Coalition 128 Women’s Action Alliance 12 women’s centres 36–8 see also names of specific centres; refuges Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) 39, 46 child-care activism by 46–7, 60 collaborations with women’s liberation 39, 153 as distinct from women’s liberation 8, 9 Women’s Health in a Changing Society conference 119, 123 women’s lands (rural women’s communes) 69–70 women’s liberation see also anti-child stereotype; listings for groups in key cities; second-wave feminism; women as distinct from earlier feminisms 4 emergence in Australia 7–8 in historical memory 8–9 relationship to the left 8–9, 14 Women’s Liberation 36 Women’s Liberation Centre 38, 96, 117, 167 Women’s Liberation Conference (Sydney, 1971) 58 Women’s Liberation Halfway House 141, 142–4, 145 Women’s Liberation House 36, 42, 54, 156 Women’s Liberation Working Women’s Group 113–14 Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative 86–9, 107, 171 see also Parents; Role Your Own working class see class World War II 11–12 Wran, Neville 125 Yeatman, Anna 23 Young, Gay and Proud 121 Young, Linda 39, 117 Young Women’s Refuge Collective 159