Veteran pollster Rod Cameron recently claimed that he hadn’t heard of ‘women’s policies’ or ‘women’s issues’ for years. It’s irrelevant now. Cameron contends that there is such a convergence going on that there are no ‘women’s issues’. Anne Summers takes a less sanguine view. For 30 years she has made women’s issues her issues and shows no signs of flagging. She first came to prominence in 1975 with her history of women in Australia, Damned Whores and God’s Police. In the preface to the 2002 edition she wrote that the collective story of women was still not sufficiently integrated into the national story to be assured of being automatically passed on. The issues are becoming submerged rather than converged. In her recent work End of Equality she outlines unequivocally how women are still battling for recognition, for equal pay, for promotion in the workplace and for the right to return to work after they have children. Her study is an extraordinary synthesis, bringing together a critical analysis of the impact of legislation and funding on the quality of women’s lives over the last two decades.
A reading of her 1975 autobiography Ducks on the Pond underscores Summers’ disturbingly honest approach and her readiness to confront personal issues. Almost 30 years later her responses, although gentle, are no less biting. Helen Garner’s novel The First Stone and the controversy surrounding it revealed that all was not well for women’s rights during the mid 90s. Summers observes that few are prepared to write in a similar vein. Although formal discrimination is a thing of the past (the Sex Discrimination Act is now 20 years old) and it is taken for granted that women can do anything—enter the armed forces, work in stevedoring or become motor mechanics—complacency has crept in. Politically, women’s claims are treated as another interest group; funding is piecemeal and sectional.
Women make up 52 per cent of the population, yet are underrepresented in senior management, are clustered in the caring professions and frequently work in the lower paid or casual industries. There no longer exists a federal women’s office to oversee all Cabinet papers—only those which are gender specific. Yet Summers argues that every Cabinet paper should have a woman’s perspective. But the malaise is deeper than this. For the last three elections women’s issues have not been highlighted by either party. Beazley released a paper on women’s policy just