Legends of the rise and of the fall: toward a poetics of histories of the Australian Women's Movement.

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

[F]eminism is not easily adapted to heroic progress narratives.... To act,



as I believe feminism does, to bring about concrete social changes while at the same time contesting the very bases of modern thinking about what constitutes "change" is to induce intense strain, almost a kind of overload, in historical articulation--and sometimes, in feminists' lives. Meaghan Morris, preface to Too Soon Too Late Legend (Medieval Latin: "things to be read"): ... (a) the title or description beneath an illustration; (b) the explanation of the symbols on a map; (c) a story or narrative which lies somewhere between myth and historical fact and which, as a rule, is about a particular figure or persons.

Until recently, and compared to other western feminisms, the Australian women's movement has been a missing subject of, or has been distinctly lacking in, extended historical and sociological analysis, with these assessments appearing ten to twelve years later than their western counterparts. Before the publication in 1996 of Gisela Kaplan's The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women's Movement 1950s-1990s, histories of the Australian women's movement were mainly article or chapter-length, often concentrating on specific locations, campaigns, or periods, or on popular autobiographical accounts. (1) The last four years, however, have seen this lack begin to be addressed, with the publication of a number of major scholarly and popular histories or assessments of second-wave feminism, most notably, The Meagre Harvest, Marilyn Lake's Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Jean Curthoys's Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women's Liberation, and Chilla Bulbeck's Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women's Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women. (2)

I was curious about these histories for a number of reasons. First, their publication in a similar period of time and after a delay suggest a specific "moment" for women's movement politics, and how these texts constructed such a moment required examination. Second, given my experiences as a feminist activist in the 1980s, and as a beneficiary of many of the struggles of the women's movement, on first reading these histories I felt a strange lack of recognition of the women's movement that these histories recounted. This estrangement arose from not only the pessimism and guardedness underlying some of these texts, but also from the way the stories were told. Thus I wished to examine just how they attempt to articulate "these startling adventures in the mundane," as Sheila Rowbotham describes the women's movement. (3)

Feminist literary critics have long recognized the importance of fictional narrative forms in structuring and limiting the possible meanings available in a text, for, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, narrative structure is "the place where ideology is coiled." (4) History, too, under the pressures of feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, has had to confront its own identity as a form of textuality rather than objective truth. (5) Hayden White argues that "histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that `liken' the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture." (6) This is not to collapse history and literature into the same genre or to ascribe to them the same truth value, but rather to realize history's own impure origins in a relationship with literature; its continued reliance on narrative, tropes, and mythoi as key to its representational strategies; and the importance of literary techniques to "unlock" not the past, but the texts of and about the past. (7) Hence I read the above mentioned histories of the Australian women's movement in terms of their narrative strategies, so as to suggest a typology and a poetics of these texts, not to discover the truest or most comprehensive account, but rather to explore feminist figurations of feminist history.

I examine the texts in terms of both the mimetic (that is, description of data) and diegetic levels (narrative and argument), and the interplay between the two (or diataxis), an approach advocated by White, and one which includes considerations of plot, character, mode of argument, implied audience, tropes, tone, and narrator. (8) The typological framework I propose is determined by a prevalent mode, approach, and/or key tropes, facilitating the classification and analysis not only of the four texts under discussion here, but of a variety of histories of feminism that have so far appeared (and will appear in the future). This enables us to uncover the discursive formations, generic constraints, and ideological tensions surrounding and characterizing Australian feminist texts, and the Australian women's movement more generally.

My typology comprises "The Big Histories," which focuses on The Meagre Harvest and Getting Equal; "Theory," a discussion of Feminist Amnesia; and "Voice," which reads Living Feminism. As my analysis will show, the texts' poetics and resultant politics arise out of the intersection of representational strategies, the author's implied political position, and the methodology or mode of conceptualizing the project. The relationship amongst these three levels is, however, not always consistent. In the case of "The Big Histories," Lake's feminist politics would not be described as liberal pluralist, yet her historiographic desire to give space to diverse forms of feminist activism produces such a text. In contrast, Kaplan's left feminism, her sociological methodology, and the resultant materialist reading of women's movement history are complementary. In "Theory," a contradiction emerges between Curthoys's desire to reinstate a truly radical feminist politics and her conservative account of feminism's decline, a split which can be traced to her philosophy-based method, moral standpoint, and hence focalization. For Bulbeck in "Voice," a similar split arises between the author's left feminism and the text's politics, and for reasons of methodology and poetics. Bulbeck's is the most unconventional approach of the four, relying as it does on oral histories and interviews. Her uncritical treatment of her subject(s) means that her goal of writing a feminist assessment of the women's movement is not fully realized.

Consequently, my reading position indeed frames these histories as legends, in the full sense of the term. They are "things to be read," and hence they become an explanation of symbols on a map of Australian feminism, stories which lie somewhere between myth and historical fact. These particular texts, as their colorful titles suggest, are indeed sites of strain: sites of political, personal, epistemological, and representational overload produced by their quest for a specifically feminist form of historical articulation. Before discussing my typology, however, I offer a brief overview of the Australian women's movement as the context for these texts, and a few speculative comments on the historical moment suggested by their recent appearance.

The origins of the Australian Women's Liberation movement lie in the new left and particularly the anti-Vietnam war movement of the late 1960s, both of which articulated broad critiques of Australian society (Kaplan, 25). The modern women's movement came into being partly as a response to the sexism of radical politics, and partly because of wider shifts in Australian society and the economy. More young women were receiving tertiary education and had rising (if unfulfilled) expectations in an expanding economy. Equality was an expectation, if not a reality (Lake, 220). The women's liberation movement through the 1970s and 1980s (later to be known only as the women's movement) comprised three ideological strands: liberal feminist (typified by the Women's Electoral Lobby [WEL]), radical feminist, and socialist feminist. Opinions vary as to whether liberal or socialist feminism was the dominant form. These ideological divisions are harder to distinguish now because of a weakening of left politics, and the influence of postmodernist and poststructuralist feminisms.

Kaplan describes the Australian women's movement as being "both utilitarian and egalitarian in principle. Australian feminists wanted services provided and infrastructures built, laws changed, books altered and equal opportunity instated" (61). According to Lake, "[t]he dominant politics of the Women's Liberation movement in the 1970s was anarchist, individualist and revolutionary," which did not, however, stop the emergence of a distinctive feature of Australian feminism, which she terms "state feminism": "whole programs and complex administrative machinery established by governments ... to promote the status of women, equal opportunity, non-discrimination and finally, affirmative action" (254, 253). By the 1980s, the grassroots women's movement had changed shape and nature, as feminist politics and activists took their politics to various sites and institutions, making feminism as a movement seem...

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