Lilith 15: 2006

Editorial

Does Feminist History still Matter?

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of Lilith. When the first edition appeared over twenty years ago in 1984, it grew from the need for an Australian journal dedicated to the publication of feminist history. Although at that time the women’s liberation movement was already in decline and fragmenting under the pressure of internal political differences, feminist history as a discipline was in its ascendancy. White Australian feminist scholars were at the forefront of raging debates over the usefulness of gender as an analytical tool, the sexual division of labour, and were slowly becoming aware of the ways in which white women benefited from the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous women and men, upon which the fiction of nationhood rested.

It goes without saying that in 2006, Lilith is published in a starkly different historical context, one in which the worth of feminism is no longer considered a given, outside of the university. February this year marked ten years of Howard Government rule. The damage done to women’s lives by homophobic legislation excluding lesbians and single women from IVF, a deliberate failure to create affordable childcare, a calculated campaign to vilify Australian Muslims and Indigenous communities, and, perhaps worst of all, the implementation of the so-called ‘Work Choices’ legislation will last much longer. Against these structural setbacks, the drive to discredit feminism as irrelevant and obsolete continues unabated, while what American feminist Ariel Levy has coined as ‘raunch culture’ thrives. As we go to press, Canberra is being rocked by the revelation that organisers of a Government conference on climate change booked a ‘burlesque’ troupe as after-dinner entertainment.1

In such interesting times, some feminists and feminist historians have begun to question how they should respond to this state of affairs, and whether feminist scholarship is equipped to take the struggle for social justice forward. In the feature article this issue, Katie Holmes asks whether today’s feminist professors, associate professors and senior lecturers have come to terms with the privilege and power they now command, and ponders how this institutionalisation moulds the history we write, and its contribution to the creation of the kind of future she wants for her daughters. Among ‘the problematics for feminist history’ she identifies are race and Aboriginal history, national and cultural identity, land and the environment, memory, war, citizenship, migration, charity, politics, and, in Howard’s Australia, the return of class.

At a one-day conference run by the Women’s History Network in Canberra this July, presenters were asked to research the current trends in feminist history publishing, both in Australia and internationally.[2] Their findings were largely positive, revealing that the history of women’s struggles, far from being killed off by gender history, is flourishing. Australian scholarship in particular was ahead in writing about race and the impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples, and generally more confident about using theory to write about the body and sexuality. The one area in which local scholars lagged behind North American and British scholars was in writing about class. Such a survey offers hope that, in spite of the myriad conservatising pressures placed on us, Australian feminist historians are well placed to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Nevertheless, Australian feminists continue to face the challenge of decentering white, middle-class feminism and deconstructing the Eurocentric tendencies within Western feminism. Although many scholars have begun this process, it is far from complete as third-wave feminist and post-colonial critiques of feminist historical praxis. We hope that this issue of Lilith will not only refresh your conviction that feminist history matters, but also demonstrate precisely why it does. The significance of the past in the lived present is at the core of this year’s edition.

In this spirit, Chilla Bulbeck delves into the question of how feminism is remembered. As part of an Australian Research Council-funded research project, she ventures beyond the myths about the irrelevance of feminism to generation X and Y, and the clash between the ideas and aspirations of ‘second-wave’ and ‘third-wave’ feminism – or post-feminism. Contrary to media hyperbole about the failure of feminism, Bulbeck’s research reveals that young women are in fact mostly positive about what feminism achieved, but sceptical about its value today. Her article is a reminder of the need for feminist historians to provide a truthful historical record of feminism which can demonstrate continuity between the struggles of yesterday and the challenges still faced by women in Australia.

Following on from this discussion of the relationship between the past and the present, Odette Kelada explores the relationship of contemporary Australian woman writers to an earlier generation of female literary pioneers. Today’s successful women writers, Kelada discovers, write with a keen consciousness of the difficulties faced by talented women such as Barbara Baynton, Marjorie Barnard, and Eleanor Dark, but struggle against the cultural forgetting which dismisses these writers as minor and ‘boring’. She highlights the continued importance of recovering these women’s lives, and of today’s writers telling their own stories for the future, echoing Dark’s prophetic remark that, ‘If you don’t write your own history, you end up living someone else’s’

Continuing the theme of inter-generational exchange, Pei Yuxin explores the ways in which young women in contemporary China constitute their gender identity through a conversation with the revolutionary Maoist past. Whereas their mothers were encouraged to reject traditional femininity and become ‘iron girls’, the women spoken to by Yuxin embrace a femininity which allows them to be both fashionable, sexually desirable and successful in their careers, as ‘beautiful women writers’ and ‘super-girls’. Chinese history, she suggests, presents a special challenge for historians of feminism, because of the way in which the expression of femininity is bound up with resistance to communist conformism. Nevertheless there are interesting parallels with western ‘third-wave’ and post-feminism.

Jumping back over a century to antebellum America, Holly Kent continues the theme of historicising feminism, challenging the depiction of mid-nineteenth-century feminists as naïve essentialists convinced of innate feminine difference. Through the writings of Paulina Wright Davis, editor of the women’s rights newspaper the Una, Kent reveals the hitherto unappreciated complexity of antebellum American feminist thought. While feminists like Wright fought for feminine difference to be viewed as valuable, they were aware of how this difference was socially constructed and looked forward to a future when femininity would be radically transformed and ‘women would become, not identical to men, but rather more fully their own, distinctly feminine selves’.

The last two articles demonstrate the diverse ways in which femininity, together with race, has been constituted and re-constituted in three different historical contexts, all of which contribute to our understanding of the interconnectedness of gender, race, sexuality and identity.

Lisa Featherstone’s penetrating study of late colonial medical journals discusses the racialisation of the maternal body in late colonial and post-federation Australia. Within this discourse the black female body was excessively sexualised, but seldom represented as maternal, and the fecundity of the Aboriginal body was virtually absent. Rare descriptions of Indigenous maternity emphasised the monstrosity of the black body and the barbarity of Indigenous customs. The apparent resilience of Indigenous women during parturition was ironically read as proof of their degeneracy. Featherstone shows how this discourse was the corollary of the white maternal ideal, and was a necessary ingredient in preserving the fiction of European superiority.

Demonstrating the evolution of this pernicious ideology, Emily Turner-Graham examines the racialised pro-natalism of the Australian Nazi community of Auslandsdeutsche, during the 1930s. Combining home-grown eugenicism with German Nazism, their newspaper Die Brücke constructed the Aryan feminine ideal as racially pure, sexually continent and devoted to her family and her race. With their exploration of the ways in which the fertile female body has historically been placed at the centre of paranoid nationalism and racial exclusion, both articles have a timely resonance.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Lilith as much as we enjoyed putting it together, and that it will provoke serious thought about both the future of feminist history and the responsibility of today’s feminists to the next generation.

Lilith Editorial Collective 2006: Katherine Pace, Natasha Campo, Barbara Lemon, Claire McLisky, Jacqueline Wilson, Katie Sutton, Carla Pascoe and Odette Kelada

Endnotes

1. Age, 8 September 2006, 1.
   
2. Thanks to Catherine Kevin for use of her paper, ‘Publishing in Dedicated Feminist History Journals’, Women’s History Day, AHA, 5 July 2006.