User:RebeccaGreen/sandbox17

Damned Whores and God's Police

Reviews of 1st edition
"Reading this book is like looking out of the window to find that most familiar landmarks have changed and quite different people are walking about. From a wide range of historical and sociological sources, from insights drawn from radical feminist debate and her own practical involvement in the feminist movement in Australia, Anne Summers has undertaken the Amazonian task of presenting a picture of Australian society and culture from its origins to the present in which Australian women for the first time are visible." "This book is a landmark in Australian feminist literature"

The Canberra Times: "INTRODUCTIONS are meant to be read first and not last. In this particular case it has to be read both first and last. Otherwise, having struggled through the wealth of new facts, interpretations and ideas in this controversial book, one finds there is a danger of overreacting to its more obvious though superficial limitations: its repetitiveness, its diffuse structure, its ideological overstating of the feminist case. To do so would be a pity because we need in fact to struggle just as hard with the introduction to judge the entire book fairly. We need to be quite clear about the author's intent, how she went about her task and why. ..... What distinguishes Anne Summers' statement of the weltanschaung of radical feminism — and herein lies the book's genuine originality — is her attempt to pioneer the process of giving these general principles concrete historical and cultural content. Like Marx's concept of class they become, in social science vernacular, her methodological tool. And what a depressing picture she has forged with that tool. On her analysis Australian women have in fact some choice of stereotype. But it is Hobson's choice. They may choose to be, through their family role, the moral guardians of society — God's police — as sanctioned by the Caroline Chisholms of Australia, always provided they are willing to be "deputies and not commanders" in the task, or, should they mistakenly contravene the prescriptions of the first they can stay with the old stereotype, forged in those halcyon convict days "when women were distributed to men as part of their daily ration": when public outrage took its cue from Lt Ralph Clark's exclamation on sighting the Lady Juliana of the Second Fleet coming into Sydney Harbour with more than 200 female convicts aboard, in June 1790: "No, No —surely not. My God not more of those damned whores...". Women's role in Australian history, Summers style, is. to be understood exclusively in terms of these stereotypes and their restrictive implications for women. They have persisted despite, indeed sometimes because of, the efforts of those who have sought to improve the lot of women over the past 100 years. Despite the struggle for equal educational rights, the vote, equal pay, women remain, as a sex, colonised by their economic dependence upon men and absence of control over their own bodies and sexuality. (The chapter on colonisation is required reading for those interested in the development of feminist theory). There is no doubt that she has in fact succeeded in doing what she set out to do. She has started the process of defining and describing the "sexist" and "oppressive" nature of Australian history and society. .... despite her deeply felt sympathy for womankind she has nowhere allowed this to extend to some of her sisters — and there are many in Australia — who do 'not see the world through radical feminist eyes: and who, however falsely, consciously support the myths of love, marriage and the family quite simply because they have been lucky enough ,to find there, some happiness as well as much frustration. And, come the sexual revolution, there may conceivably be some women who —just for that reason — will choose the present sexual status quo — Hobson's choice or not."

impact of this and other feminist histories of the 1970s was assessed in a special issue of Australian Historical Studies, vol 27 no 106 (April 1996). "This paper examines four key texts in Australian women's history—Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia 1788 to 1975, Penguin, 1976; Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Penguin, 1975; Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, 1788-1974, Nelson, 1975; and Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, Nelson, 1975. The paper discusses the context within which these texts were produced and then examines them as works of history, noting especially the continuities and discontinuities between these texts and current work in Australian women's history.    It Was 1975

This paper examines four key texts in Australian women's history--Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia 1788 to 1975, Penguin, 1976; Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Penguin, 1975; Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, 1788-1974, Nelson, 1975; and Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, Nelson, 1975. The paper discusses the context within which these texts were produced and then examines them as works of history, noting especially the continuities and discontinuities between these texts and current work in Australian women's history.

This issue of Australian Historical Studies and the conference on which it is based mark a very important event in Australian history and historiography--the publication within a short time span of four major books announcing the arrival of a new kind of history, Australian women's history. They were Miriam Dixson's The Real Matilda, Anne Summers' Damned Whores and God's Police, both published by Penguin, and Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon's Gentle Invaders, and Beverley Kingston's My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, both published by Nelson.[1] Together these books inaugurated new research in the field, drawing to it significant public interest and attention. This paper sets out to do several things: briefly describe the environment in which four major books establishing a new field came to be written at the same time; investigate the similarities and differences among the four, in terms not only of ideas but also of genre, as modes of historical writing, as textuality; and, finally, suggest some of the continuities and discontinuities between these texts and current work. I have found rereading these books fascinating; in some respects they remain as I remember them, in others they are quite surprising. Like all works of history, they tell us not only about the times they describe but also about the time in which they were written. Rereading them now affords us an opportunity to place our current endeavours as historians in continuing histories and historiography.

The historical context 1970-75 These books arose in a distinct historical context. During the time they were being written, Australia was experiencing its first federal Labor government in twenty-three years, a relatively reforming government that became fairly sympathetic to the demands of the women's movement, which, while not as entirely new as it might have thought itself, certainly erupted around 1970 in a new and aggressive form. This modern women's movement included both Women's Liberation (WL) and the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), which had close personal connections with each other though somewhat different political philosophies. WEL was more in the tradition of reformist labour and left-liberal politics, seeking to achieve change through direct pressure on government and other mainstream institutions. Women's Liberation had a more suspicious attitude to the mainstream political system and was more likely to talk in terms of revolution. The advent, however, of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 had done much to blur these boundaries, as the revolutionaries of WL and the reformists of WEL entered very similar political arenas, both looking to an innovative altruistic state. So much had the political climate shifted between 1970 and 1975 that, by the time these four books appeared, the phrase 'Women's Liberation' was in the process of being displaced by the terms 'feminist' and the inclusive 'women's movement', signifying, I think, the independence of the movement from its New Left origins. The Labor government supported equal pay, introduced the first femocrats to monitor the effects of government policy on women, and allocated unprecedented funds to childcare, refuges and women's health. It was, however, when these books appeared in 1975, also a government in severe political difficulties.[2]

Another important context was the rapid growth in the number of women attending university, which had continued from the 1960s. This meant an important body of women PhD students, as Anne Summers was, and fairly recent doctoral and masters graduates, as Beverley Kingston, Anne Conlon and Miriam Dixson were. The women's movement began to have its impact in universities from the very early 1970s, expressed in demands for separate women's studies courses and for more content about women in other courses. Women students and young lecturers quickly became very conscious of the male-centredness of their education, the dearth of women academics and the paucity of texts asking or attempting to answer feminist questions. In the earliest years of the 1970s, feminist articles were carried particularly in the Melbourne Marxist journal, Arena, with Refactory Girl starting in 1973 and Hecate in 1975; Labour History, from about 1975, also became an important platform for feminist historical scholarship.

This conjunction of an active women's movement with a growing number of young university women seeking to integrate their feminist politics and their academic work had particular implications for the discipline of history. Several people began to urge the development of a new feminist history. I wrote one such exhortatory article myself, in 1970.[3] My article, 'Women's Liberation and Historiography', was prompted in particular by two other articles--one by Anna Yearman on 'Women's Liberation' in Arena in early 1970, and the other by Ian Turner in Julie Rigg's collection, In Her Own Write, in 1969.[4] Anna Yeatman had drawn attention to the intellectual implications of the new movement for women's liberation, while Ian Turner had attempted to summarise the state of historical knowledge on Australian women's history at the time. I wanted to put the two together. Quite independently, in the early 1970s, several women began to research and write the new history. One--Anne Summers--had gained an honours degree in politics from the University of Adelaide. In 1970, she began her PhD, originally at the University of New South Wales and then at the University of Sydney, with Henry Mayer as supervisor, specifically on Australian women's history. At the time of publication, she was still a doctoral student at the University of Sydney. In the Penguin first edition of her book, her women's movement credentials were also emphasised: setting up the first Women's Liberation group in Adelaide in 1970, helping to start the feminist journal Refractory Girl, and establishing the Elsie women's refuge in Sydney. Damned Whores and God's Police

Anne Summers' Damned Whores and God's Police was the most ambitious of the four books, combining the projects of the other three and adding several arguments of its own. It shares with The Real Matilda a positioning of itself as an argument, a conversation with international theorists and Australian male historians. The first half of the book is scarcely historical at all; rather, it is a form of popular sociology of the type established by writers such as Donald Horne, Craig McGregor, Ronald Conway, and W.K. Hancock, all of whom it discusses. Yet it departs significantly from The Real Matilda in emphasising not women's low self-esteem but the forces of sexist ideology, sex stereotyping and sex roles. Its primary target is 'sexism', a ruling ideology through which women are oppressed, and which is maintained by a 'vast array of cultural assumptions, prejudices, myths, fears and other ideologies' (p. 25). Again and again, the point is made that women are not culturally valued, that they are offered only very limited options.

Damned Whores and God's Police shares with Dixson, though, an emphasis on convict women. To my mind, the most striking chapter in the book is still chapter eight, entitled 'Damned Whores'. Here, convict women are seen as surviving mainly through prostitution and the point is made repeatedly that women 'had no option but to prostitute themselves' (p. 273). The images of sexual servitude, sexual abuse and debauchery are powerful, and they are extended to free immigrant women also, especially through a depiction of the wild scenes greeting them when they arrived: 'Hordes of men would assemble at the docks, waiting to claim their share of the imported goods. Employers seeking domestic servants had to battle with lustful men who had no intention of paying for the services they required.' In this chapter, too, Summers drew the Parramatta Female Factory to feminists' attention in a lively and evocative way. Yet, if Damned Whores and God's Police shares with The Real Matilda an evocation of women's oppression and victimhood, it balances that with a much stronger sense of women's political activism, emphasising women's energetic campaigning round the turn of the century for the vote, and for a whole range of reforms affecting the family.

Damned Whores and God's Police also shares many of the concerns of My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, in its depiction of nineteenth-century marriage as essential for respectability and security, yet entailing the loss of all independence. It, too, traces the differences between the married and unmarried state, and depicts single, professional women in very similar terms: 'The social world they constructed around themselves was either ignored or ridiculed; they were pitied because they did not have children, they were assumed to have no opportunities for sexual expression and were categorised as frustrated' (p. 331). And, at times, it sounds very much like Gentle Invaders, detailing women's wage labour, female unionism, the Harvester judgement and, later, the growth in women's employment, especially during World War II. Nevertheless, the discussion of work is secondary to that of women's oppression through masculinist (it would say 'sexist') ideology and culture.

Rereading Damned Whores and God's Police after a very long time, I am struck by the ambition and inclusiveness of the project, the narrative drive, the combination of emphases on women's political agency and their cultural and social victimhood. The value of the book now seems to me to lie not in the quality of historical analyses, for I think a great many of them can be and have been overturned, but in its sweeping feminist vision, its confident narration, its strange but exhilarating mixture of women's history as dream and nightmare. Continuities and discontinuities

Many things reveal these texts as of their own time. The most outstanding discontinuity is the very fleeting attention to race, and to questions of invasion, indigneous dispossession, non-British immigration, multiculturalism--that is, racial and cultural diversity. The main ethnic divisions recognised are those between Irish- and English-descended Australians. It is particularly striking how often words such as 'invaders' and 'colonisation', which we would now associate with a history of Aboriginal-European relationships, are used to describe an allwhite history--women invade the workplace, white men colonise the bodies of white women. As a result of the critiques from Aboriginal, immigrant and overseas commentators, we now operate in a very different intellectual climate. One only has to compare the recent collection, Gender Relations in Australian History: Domination and Negotiation, or the multi-authored Creating a Nation, to all these four texts to see how much things have changed.[9] The four books differ, though, in the way they deal with questions of race and colonisation. .... Damned Whores and God's Police mentions Aboriginal people scarcely at all. When it does, it refers only to the women, who carry a double burden: 'As women, they were seen as sexual objects and fair game for white men; as members of a subject people they were also victims of the whole range of indignities bestowed by a brutal invading colonialism which considered itself to be the master race' (p. 276). What really interests Summers, though, is the adaptation of the concept of colonialism to the situation of women, and she draws a quite extended analogy, suggesting that the four phases of colonialism apply to men's relation to women's bodies: (1) the invasion and conquering of a territory, (2) the cultural domination of its inhabitants, (3) dividing and therefore ruling the native inhabitants, and (4) extraction of profits from the colonised territory. It is all quite clever but, to my mind, it doesn't work. The appropriation of indigenous experience in this way to illuminate the historical experiences of white women would be quite unthinkable today.

Yet, there are interesting continuities as well. A decidedly Gothic sensibility is present in Dixson, Kingston and Summers, their sense of history as failure and nightmare set consciously against what they see as conventional celebratory male national histories. Their histories remind us of the interest generated by the new feminism of the early 1970s in older Australian literary texts, especially Barbara Baynton's Bush Studies, and its story, 'Squeaker's Mate', with its especially Gothic vision of the perils facing isolated white women in the Australian bush. This Gothic strain also stands in contrast to a tradition of feminist hope and dream, moved either by a liberal feminist vision of the reluctantly but nevertheless ultimately benevolent state, or by a persisting belief in women's agency and power, their ability to survive and even triumph in the face of apparently overwhelmingly patriarchal forces. At least since the 1890s, these strains and fissures between nightmare visions and liberal hope and triumphalism have worked within and between feminist texts, both literary and historical. The dark visions of slavery, colonisation, servitude and oppression that run through Summers, Kingston and Dixson can also be seen in the work of later Australian feminist historians, such as Judith Allen in Sex and Secrets, Jill Matthews in Good and Mad Women, and in some of Marilyn Lake's writings, especially 'Intimate Strangers', her much-noticed chapter in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee's People's History of Australia.[10] The tradition of feminist hope and dream is represented, in contrast, in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan's Debutante Nation, Joy Damousi's Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia, 1890-1955, and Audrey Oldfield's Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle?[11] Conclusion

There are two commonly told tales about the history of Australian women's history. One is that the historians led feminist scholarship intellectually in the 1970s but were somewhat overtaken by the philosophers and textual critics-literary and artistic--in the 1980s. The other writes a history of progress, from the early days of gap-filling 'women's' history to later ones of 'feminist' national history setting out to challenge the mainstream.

I don't think, though, that we can quite accept either of these stories. Women's history now operates within a climate vastly different from that of twenty years ago. It is infinitely larger, more secure, and influenced by feminist theory coming from sources outside the discipline of history itself. Like Australian feminist scholarship generally, women's history intervenes in international debates to a greater extent than was possible twenty years ago, though the national framework of the discipline still means that such interventions are more difficult for historians than for philosophers and many others. In the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of women's studies has become so strong that the distinctions are no longer so clear, as historians become increasingly textual, literary critics increasingly historical, and feminist theory defines a sphere of its own. The historians have not so much lost leadership as been joined and influenced by feminist scholars from other disciplines.

Nor is it appropriate to describe the project of women's history as ever having been one of 'gap-filling'. The desire to challenge the mainstream was there all along. Summers and Dixson, especially, saw their task as a new kind of national history, not a specific field of women's history. Yet, it is true that the ambitions of 'women's history' have been extended. Our terminology has tended to change, from that of 'women's history' to 'feminist history', and it is interesting to ponder why. In part, the term 'feminist' has become academically respectable; where once the phrase would have seemed impossibly political and ideological in an academic context, now it is perfectly acceptable, even in conservative academic frameworks. Theoretical debates have changed and the place of Marxist thought in feminist scholarship has diminished considerably. In part, feminist historians have begun to focus on a wider range of issues than they did in 1975. One major change that has occurred is the development of a gendered analysis to illuminate masculinity as much as femininity, while another has been the development of a relatively separate world of studies of sexuality that intersects with feminist scholarship but is neither subsumed within it nor subsumes it. And, in part, feminist history has influenced and been influenced by an increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity in the discipline itself, centred on the problem of the status of historical knowledge.

History is not just what we do in a scholarly sense but something we live through. What these texts did is help inspire a new generation to work within the sphere of women's history and to develop a lively feminist history. I want to conclude by paying tribute to the authors of these four texts for breaking new ground, and for moving feminist history from the programmatic manifesto phase of the early 1970s to the body of research and writing that it has become ever since. In imagining a new past, their books were truly gifts for the future."

2nd edition
" A. Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, Penguin, Melbourne, 1975, 1994. pp.ix + 549, rrp $19.95 (pb), ISBN 0 14 023187 0.

Anne Summers' first and most famous book needs no introduction. It remains a milestone in the development of 'second wave' feminism in this country. This revised and updated edition irons out the factual inaccuracies of the first and adds two chapters assessing some of the more important changes in the status of Australian women over the past two decades. One of the new chapters is on women in politics. Essentially positive and optimistic. 'We have witnessed and been part of, she writes in an introduction, 'nothing less than a revolution in the lives of women and men'. It's hard to believe that less than 20 years ago terms like 'sexual harassment' and 'date rape' were hardly used."

4th edition
"This new edition of Damned Whores and God's Police came out of a conference held in September 2015 to mark the forty years that have passed since the book was first published. As with previous editions in 1994 and 2002, the original text of some 500 pages is reproduced unchanged, with additional commentary to bring the publication up to date. The result in 2016 is a great doorstopper of 750 pages and more. The many-layered paratext includes: from 1994 an "Author's note to the new edition", an "Introduction to the new edition" and a "Letter to the next generation"; from 2002 an "Author's note to the second revised edition", and an overview, "The march of women" with a "Timeline of achievements by and for Australian women"; and in the current edition an "Introduction to the 2016 edition" and a much augmented timeline.

Many readers of this review will have encountered Damned Whores and God's Police at school. Many more will be familiar with its central theme: that Australian women will never be free until they escape their characterisation as either whores or mothers. The historical resonance of this insight is enough to justify keeping the book in print (or at least available online). A new generation of readers will find that the original text is mostly still accessible and coherent, and a lively account of Australian women's experience. The overview and timeline of women's history in Australia is a valuable resource for secondary students (though a searchable online version would be even better).

The re-publication of the multiple layers of paratext is harder to justify. Casual readers and student researchers will probably find the proliferation of forewords and afterwords confusing. Summers wants to reach a new generation of readers, to persuade them to continue the fight. She defends the paratext in terms of "authenticity" and historical specificity: "We need to understand how it was then, partly so we can see how much we have changed" (5). The words of Sheila Rowbotham, cited in the original text, spell out the hope implied here; "When we look back at ourselves through our own cultural creations, our actions, our ideas, our pamphlets, our organisations, our history, our theory, we begin to integrate a new reality ... We begin to use our self-consciousness strategically. We can see what we could not see before" (622–3). But that inspiring vision is directed, not to a general readership, but to an existing women's movement. The new edition looks backwards. It stands as a monument to a mighty historical achievement, not as a beacon to the future.

So it is historiographers and students of women's history who will find some interest in the whole compendium. The influence of Summers and Damned Whores on the Australian women's movement has been profound, and the movement has in turn shaped Summers' thought and action. This is most visible in her changing account of feminism, and of the place within feminism of the goals of liberation and equality. In 1975, as Summers remembers it, "We did not call ourselves feminists ... Feminists, we thought, were quaint relics with their fixations on peace, abstinence from alcohol, and an obscure concept called rights ... we were women's liberationists" (646). The 1975 text mounts a lengthy argument for commitment to liberation and personal transformation rather than equality and legal reform (622–40). In 2016 Summers embraces feminism and urges substantive reform: "our energies would be better directed towards addressing the issues of inequality and actually changing them ... We would do better to measure women's representation ... and to concern ourselves with the substance of women's equality and how we can accelerate its pace" (5, emphasis in the original).

How is this to be done? Summers' answer is much the same in 2016 as it was in 1994 and 2002: "What this means is that young women are going to have to take up that fight, and keep it going" (15). This might be read as a gospel of despair—after all, Summers has described these same young women as caught in the God's Police stereotype and "still constrained by the social imperatives of motherhood" (8). But Summers is sustained by a belief in historical progress. The story of Damned Whores and God's Police is for her "the story of Australian women's evolution towards equality" (3). We can only hope that she is right."