Damned Whores and God's Police Read online

  With discrimination finally against the law, things changed – big and small. A small example: the signs on the toilet doors in the federal parliament had to be repainted. Women or Men – instead of Senators or Members. A bigger one: Deborah Wardley, seeking a job with the now defunct Ansett Airlines, won an anti-discrimination action, which took four years and went all the way to the High Court, before she was eventually employed as a commercial pilot in 1979. (Of course, she could not have launched the action – or won it – without the Victorian anti-discrimination laws.)

  These laws have not solved everything. Despite numerous laws and court decisions stipulating equal pay, women continue to be paid an average of 18 per cent less than men. A 2012 NATSEM report calculated that over her lifetime, a 25-year-old woman with postgraduate qualifications would earn $2.49 million whereas the man who sat beside her in class would, over his lifetime, earn $3.78 million.4 The persistent gender pay gap, together with women’s often-interrupted workforce participation, due to taking time out when their children are young, also produces discrepancies in women’s retirement income. Recent calculations put women’s average superannuation balance at retirement at $112 600 compared with $198 000 for men.5 One in three women have no superannuation at all.

  Because we have become so concerned with measuring change, we may have lost sight of some of the important concerns I tried to address when I wrote this book. These days we are preoccupied with ‘how far have we come’ and, its corollary, ‘how far we have left to go’. Of course, I agree that we need to measure progress, and to call attention to backsliding and backlash. I have done this myself in subsequent books, namely The End of Equality (2003) and The Misogyny Factory (2013). I felt it was necessary to write these books because our progress has been so uneven; it was important to document the many ways our previous gains were under threat. But I never wanted this running the ruler over legal, economic, political and other easily measurable forms of progress to be the only way we looked at ourselves.

  If we only do that, we lose sight of the truth.

  I think it is widely agreed that Damned Whores and God’s Police told a truth that all of us recognised, and that is why the book lasted so long and why it continues to resonate today, even though it has been out of print for so long. It confronted us with something we knew to be true. It was an uncomfortable truth, but it explained a lot of things.

  But today we do not talk so much about what in the book I called the ‘invisible barriers’ – the ways women limited themselves and collaborated with the culture of oppression. We need to resume that conversation because while we might have made major changes and mapped a path to full equality, I am not sure if we have sufficiently reinvented ourselves.

  The core argument of the book was that Australian women had been defined and constrained by stereotypes that both prescribed and proscribed certain ways of behaving. I drew on Australian history to find the terms ‘Damned Whores’ and ‘God’s Police’ so that the classic madonna/whore dualism resonated with our own story and our own experience. My argument was that women in Australia had been kept in check by the God’s Police stereotype, both by the ways women were deemed by society to see motherhood and family as their ultimate aspiration, and by the social exclusion they suffered as a result of being castigated as a Damned Whore if they refused.

  I wrote:

  The major impediment to female rebellion, and that which keeps women physically and psychologically bound to their family-centred roles, has been the absence of any cultural tradition that approved of women being anything else.

  We should be asking: is this still true today? Are Australian women still constrained by the social imperatives of motherhood? Are women expected to fit everything else they do around this, still primary, role as mothers? Are most, if not all, of the measures ostensibly designed to promote equality in the workplace in effect measures to make it easier for women to add this economic role onto their, still primary, role as mothers? Are flexible work policies all about making it easier for women – not men – to juggle kids and jobs? Why does the cost of child care invariably come from the woman’s salary? Do women feel guilty about being in employment? Do men?

  We have not fully confronted these fundamental questions. Women are still expected to do more, but men are not required to change. We have not said: women might be the ones who bear the children, but their entire lives should not be defined by that one capability. We have changed a lot, but we have not changed this. We are ready for women to do more, so long as they first of all fulfil their primary role. There is still no expectation, let alone demand, that men’s employment lives ought to be disrupted when they have children as women’s inevitably are. Women themselves do not expect or demand this of the fathers of their children. Why not?

  Many, if not most, women still accept, deep down, that it is their role to be God’s Police. They believe they are responsible for the emotional, as well as the physical, running of the family; it is their job to manage and monitor and, where necessary, censor the behaviour of their husbands and their children. And there is wide consensus, in Australia and elsewhere, that this is the way things should be. Many women today want to add to, and modernise, the God’s Police role rather than redefine, let alone abandon, it completely.

  I am struck by how many women today, aged in their 30s and 40s with big, full-time jobs and two or three children, have chosen to take on additional domestic roles such as baking, sewing, preserving or other time-consuming (and, I would argue, unnecessary) tasks that once fully occupied women who had no choice but to be what we today like to call ‘domestic goddesses’. Why do these women feel the need to do this? Is it atonement for not being full-time mothers? Is it to demonstrate that their economic role outside the home does not come at the cost of domestic accomplishments? Is it to head off criticism that they are neglecting their nurturing roles? How to explain the often torrid criticisms of working mothers by their stay-at-home counterparts over such issues as tuckshop rosters? Why on earth do so many women feel so compromised or defensive simply because they are exercising their option to pursue equality?

  Of course, it is true that women do have more choices today. We can decide to not marry, to not have children, to live openly in a same-sex relationship, to live happily alone – ‘spinster’ is another word that has, thankfully, pretty much disappeared from our vocabulary. Our choices – whatever they are – are more likely to be accepted now than was the case four decades ago. But we have not overcome the dualism.

  We have not disavowed that motherhood is still the central, preferable and most admired option for women. We might not overtly punish women who are not mothers but we have our ways of letting them know they have fallen short of the ideal. For instance, by calling them ‘deliberately barren’6, as a Liberal Party Senator accused Julia Gillard, who was then the deputy leader of the Labor Party and about to become deputy prime minister.

  We still differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women. Emily Maguire, the writer, examined this proposition in Princesses and Pornstars (2008) and concluded that the stereotypes have not vanished, they have merely been updated:

  Young women are told they can be and do anything, yet in the eye of the media and mainstream culture the choices are still either/or. You can be a mother or have a proper career. You can have orgasms or respect. You can be independent or adored.7

  This conclusion is depressing because it confirms the enduring nature of these cultural shackles.

  And it has been recently re-confirmed. Take the example, again, of Julia Gillard who became our first female prime minister in 2010. This was a significant milestone in the march of Australian women towards equality but, it turns out, as a nation we were incapable of embracing it. Instead, Gillard was subjected to a sordid and disgraceful barrage of pornographic, sexist and misogynist commentary from the Opposition, the media, members of her own party, and the general public, which undermined her legitimacy and succeeded in generating such widesp
read doubt about her ability to govern that she was unceremoniously dumped by her party.8

  Gillard herself drew on the damned whores and God’s police stereotypes to describe the situation she found herself in as prime minister when she wrote in her memoir in 2014:

  It felt to me as prime minister that the binary stereotypes were still there, that the only two choices available were good woman or bad woman. As a woman wielding power, with all the complexities of modern politics, I was never going to be portrayed as a good woman. So I must be the bad woman, a scheming shrew, a heartless harridan or a lying bitch.9

  It is clear that the stereotypes persist well into the 21st century.

  Another recent and telling example of how we still expect women to play the role of God’s Police was the federal government decision in September 2015 that Australia would accept a large number of Syrian refugees.

  In making this announcement, the then prime minister Tony Abbott said:

  … our focus for these new 12,000 permanent resettlement places will be those people most in need of permanent protection – women, children and families from persecuted minorities … I do want to stress women, children and families – the most vulnerable of all.10

  As the media was quick to point out, this was code for ‘No single men’.

  We did not want our society disrupted by an influx of uncontrollable men who, the assumption goes, would be an unruly and disorderly presence in our society.

  Caroline Chisholm could hardly have put it better herself. She did not use the language of national security as Tony Abbott did, and she was referring to immigrants rather than refugees, but the assumptions were the same when she referred to ‘“God’s police” – wives and little children – good and virtuous women’.11

  The media made no comment about whether single women would be included in this refugee intake. In fact, if you just went on media reports, you could conclude there are NO single Syrian women. Just ‘families’ or ‘single men’. The unspoken message here was that ‘single men’ could include jihadists and terrorists among their number whereas ‘families’ – ‘wives and little children’ – posed no security threat to our country. There is, unfortunately, plenty of evidence to contradict this assumption. ‘Black widows’ and other women, many of them mothers, have become suicide bombers or shooters. Categorising people according to their family status is delusionary and, quite possibly, dangerous. Yet another reason to stop doing it.

  If we still have God’s Police, then we must also still have their opposite, the bad women. In 1975, I identified prostitutes, lesbians and women in prison as replacing the female convicts as the modern-day damned whores. They were then seen as the Other. They had transgressed. They were repudiated for their sexuality or for flouting other conventions of society. They were spurned for not being the way women were supposed to be: subservient, submissive, dependent.

  Despite our claims to champion equality, and for all the progress we have made, we still punish women who are outspoken or contrarian, who step outside the modernised notion of God’s Police. So who are today’s bad girls?

  You might argue that at a time when young women today march in Slut Walks, asserting their right to dress as whores once might have, this category does not make much sense any more. In fact, the opposite is true. It seems that the numbers and types of women who are today treated as the Other, as transgressors, as modern-day damned whores, are large and growing.

  It is women online expressing provocative opinions – or, often, even any opinions. It is women occupying public spaces and asserting their rights to define their issues and themselves. It is women campaigning to keep abortion rights, or arguing for equal representation in every area of society. In fact, perhaps the easiest way to identify today’s damned whores is by the opposition they generate and by the sexualised nature of much of that opposition. ‘Slut-shaming’ – attacking women on sexual grounds, real or invented – epitomises the new weapon against women. It is new but it is also depressingly familiar to attempt to degrade women on sexual grounds. It confirms how entrenched the stereotypes still are. And how they have adapted to new realities; one of the most reviled groups of women in Australia today is those who cover their faces and their bodies. That the woman in the hijab or the burkha is, ironically, seen by many as more transgressive than the woman who walks semi-naked down the street to ‘reclaim the night’ is one measure of the persistence, and the evolution, of the ‘damned whore’ stereotype. The alarming increase in violence against women, so much of it fatal, is another measure.

  In 1975 I had no idea that my analysis would resonate in the way it did.

  It is certainly not something that I could have imagined while I was struggling to write the book.

  In my autobiography Ducks on the Pond, I described my fears as I tried to write. I was afraid I could not finish it, I was afraid that no-one would read it, but most of all I was afraid that I was not up to the task that I had set out for myself, which was nothing less than to rewrite our history and our sociology so we could understand the place that women had been assigned in our national story.

  Did I have the courage to ‘take on’ the grand old men of Australian history and literature? To attack them for what we used to call their ‘male chauvinist’ assumptions and to provide some markers towards a different story, one that shone a light on the mostly neglected achievements of women and that also asked why women had been so often overlooked in the past.

  In the end, I found it in myself to do so and it was an important – and lasting – lesson, for me and, I hope, for others. I learned to be brave. I learned to shuck off the timidity that prevents so many of us from standing up and fighting. In mid-September 2014 in Melbourne, Quentin Bryce told a group of schoolgirls: ‘Be bold, be bold, be bold’.12 This is the most important advice women of my generation can give to the young. Whether it is to ask for that pay rise, or that promotion, or that book review writing assignment, or to lobby politicians or hold one’s own in an argument with male colleagues, we have to be brave, we have to learn to take risks and we have to be confident about ourselves. And whenever we are wrong (as we sometimes will be) or make mistakes or suffer serious setbacks, we have to just get up and keep going.

  I am reminded of the famous feminist song, ‘Don’t be too polite, girls’ by the late Melbourne singer-songwriter Glen Tomasetti. It was known as the Equal Pay Anthem and it began:

  Don’t be too polite, girls, don’t be too polite

  Show a little fight, girls, show a little fight.13

  We need to know that, despite the palpable gains of the past 40 years, our fight is far from over. It is not just that we still have so much unfinished business: equal pay, equal representation in parliaments and elsewhere, freedom from violence, to name just a few of our important issues.

  The frightening reality is that there are forces in Australia, and globally, that would strip away what we have already won. We see what is happening in the US to abortion rights, with a massive regulatory assault being mounted at state level to undermine or even totally prevent women exercising their constitutional right to abortion as set down by the 1973 US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

  It is sobering to realise that there has not been a UN conference on women since the landmark conference in Beijing in 1995 because of the realistic fear that the principles of the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action14, especially those pertaining to women’s reproductive rights, would not be re-affirmed today. In other words, if there were to be a new global conference of women, as there used to be every five years between 1975 and 1995, we would lose ground. So for 20 years, we have stood still or been required to use other mechanisms, such as the Millennium Development Goals or, coming up, the Sustainable Development Goals, to maintain the global women’s agenda.

  What this means is that young women are going to have to take up that fight, and keep it going. They are going to have to fight to keep what we already have – what they grew up assuming
was unassailable and irreversible – and they are going to have to fight to enable us to keep moving forward. They are going to need to be brave and to be bold and they certainly can’t afford to be polite! This is not a job for God’s Police.

  The fight has become not just necessary but urgent because of the shocking increase in violence against women in Australia, more and more of it fatal. The Counting Dead Women site on the Destroy the Joint Facebook page put the number of women killed in Australia in 2015 at 79.

  In 52 weeks 79 women died violent deaths – 17 of them in the final weeks of 2015 and most of them at the hands of their current or former partners. In addition, we know that every three hours around Australia, a woman is hospitalised with injuries inflicted by a partner or family member. We count the deaths, but we have not yet found a way to count the injuries, including the permanent physical and psychological wounds.

  There is no doubt that this violence is due to a great many men being unable to accept women as equals or as independent beings. For these men, women belong – and should stay – in the pre- ordained and subordinate roles the stereotypes laid out for them.