Contemporary Australia: Women

29 Sally Smart Australia b.1960 Die Dada Puppen (detail) 1998–99 Synthetic polymer paint on fabric and wood with various assemblage elements Studio installation view Photograph: Gary Ireland Image courtesy: The artist how loudly they shout, how eloquently they write, how politely or how stridently they interject, their experiences and voices — their very existence — is ignored. Part of this is journalistic laziness — far easier to churn out a sensationalist piece on what little the girls at some nightclub wear and chuck in a quote from some feminism-rejecting pop-star, than it is to spend time speaking to a variety of women and girls about their concerns and aspirations. Part of it is down to cynical editorial decisions to run stories that can be illustrated with upskirt shots of teenagers that will attract hundreds of scandalised, moralistic comments and so increase online page hits. But there’s something more to the mass denial of the living, breathing feminism in this country than simple media laziness or cynicism. There is also a widespread perception that ‘back in the day’ feminism had a clear political focus and that what passes for feminism today does not. The list of organisations and activities I’ve given here would seem to confirm the alleged fragmentation of today’s movement. There’s a sense out there that because there is no monolithic women’s rights organisation, no official Feminist Club to distribute membership cards, rule books and agendas, that feminism must be on its way out. Now, although I wasn’t there ‘back in the day’, from what I’ve read and conversations I’ve had with people who were, it seems to me that the idea of a cohesive movement is a bit of a myth. As long as there has been feminism or women’s liberation or women’s suffrage, there have been disagreements and splits. This is a good thing! All that conflict and debate have made feminism the vibrant and creative movement it is today. As Carmen Callil, co-founder of feminist publishing company Virago Press, has written, ‘all movements thrive on a sense of pouncing disapproval in the air.’ 6 That fragmentation is a strength not a weakness is truer now than it ever was. As feminism has matured and taken on the lessons of the past, there has been an increased understanding that all women are not oppressed on equal terms simply because they’re women. There’s an acknowledgement that people face interlocking systems of oppression and interrelated causes of disadvantage based on gender, race, class, sexuality and citizenship status, among other things. And all this is the organised, publicised tip of the creative feminist iceberg. There are hordes of young feminists painting and drawing and sculpting, writing songs and poetry and novels, and making short films. They’re running blogs and uploading mashups of sexist ads to YouTube. They’re starting feminist Facebook groups and running successful campaigns to shut down misogynistic ones. They’re printing up stickers with feminist slogans and sticking them over the top of newsagency porn mags and sexist bus shelter advertisements. They’re doing all this and more off their own bat, completely independent of any organisation and without identifying with any school of feminist thought. They’re reading heavy theory and feminist memoirs and pop-culture critiques and they’re taking the experiences of earlier feminist thinkers and activists and applying their lessons to the world as it is right now. Using the tools of the twenty-first century, they are, as Bikini Kill put it, ‘turning cursive letters into knives’. * * * All of this will come as a surprise to some readers. It’s odd — so much inspiring, righteous, political, creative, world-changing stuff is happening and yet I still often hear or read that young people aren’t politically active and today’s women are only interested in pole dancing and embracing their inner Martha Stewart, and that this means feminism is over and done with. Like I said, it’s odd. And extremely infuriating. The history of the women’s movement is the history of women fighting to be heard — to have their votes counted; to have a say in public policy; to have medical science take their experiences of their bodies, and especially of pregnancy and childbirth, seriously; to have lawmakers and enforcers acknowledge their experiences of street harassment, rape and domestic violence; to have the world respect their voices as professors and managers and workers and political leaders and mothers and citizens. Thanks to the battles fought by previous generations of feminists, those voices are now heard in every area of public life — although, as noted, in many fields they are still outnumbered by male voices. But talk to young women and women outside of the white, middle‑class, heterosexual mainstream and many will tell you that they feel invisible. They feel that no matter how hard they work, I can hear her breathing