Come out united and fighting
The following is abridged from the opening address to the Network of Women Students Australia 2000 conference held in Adelaide, July 10-15, presented by veteran Adelaide feminist and socialist CONNIE FRAZER.
Well, it's interesting to be back at Flinders University after 24 years! Then I was a co-convenor of women's studies.
Women's studies, which came out of the women's liberation movement, was very different in those days. At Flinders we had participatory democracy so the students made the rules. You didn't have to be an enrolled student (which is where I came in, as a housewife) and the enrolled students could be assessed by work they did with women in the community as well as written essays.
I had joined the women's liberation movement in 1972 and started a small group in my suburb. Three of us (all housewives) decided to do the women's studies course, two of us going on to apply for the co-convenor positions.
When we discovered one of our number was a battered wife, we thought there should be a women's shelter in the area and opened this tiny drop-in centre in the main street of Christies Beach. This became the Christies Beach Women's Shelter — now the Southern Women's.
So how did I come to join the women's liberation movement? On TV I witnessed this Queensland politician being interviewed about a pamphlet Sydney Women's Liberation were distributing called "What every girl should know" (about contraception). There was, of course, a diagram of female genitalia.
He was saying, "Look at this! I wouldn't let my 16-year-old daughter see this!" I thought, well, I would, if I had one. And what a hypocrite he turned out to be; in later years he was charged with making money out of prostitution, yet he wouldn't allow his daughter to think about her own body.
So when I noticed in a local newspaper a classified advertisement for the pamphlet, I wrote away for one, and that was my first contact.
Later my son, who had joined Resistance and the Democratic Socialist Party, of which I'm now a member, told me that two of their women members were meeting about women's liberation in the group's Rundle Street headquarters. I said, "I'll join that group" and went on from there.
This group was called, very grandly, "The Women's Action Coalition" — considering there were only two schoolgirls and me. Imagine me, a 47-year-old housewife wearing a skirt, nylon stockings, lipstick, rouge and hair neatly curled, and the others, one wearing a boy's shirt, neck open exposing a large part of a breast, including nipple, rolling her own cigarette, and the other lass with bare feet.
I sat there thinking, whatever must they think of me! Then one of them handed me a leaflet called "The myth of the vaginal orgasm". I wondered afterward whether they thought, "If she isn't shocked by this, she must be okay".
It was this group that suggested to the Adelaide lot a march through city streets to mark International Women's Day and both groups came together to organise this on March 11, 1972. We came down Rundle Street, holding hands and singing "Reach out a hand, give it to a sister", feeling strong.
At this march we stated five basic demands: free abortion on demand; free, 24-hour, good quality child-care centres; free, readily available contraception; non-sexist education; and equal job opportunities with equal pay. Later we added non-sexist advertising.
After that IWD march, many more women joined and all the existing groups (there were quite a few by then) joined together to open Bloor Court Women's Liberation Centre. We rented an old factory floor where, appropriately, women had worked stitching men's shirts for a pittance.
Here we could have meetings in the city and hold consciousness-raising groups. We compiled a huge information file. We started an abortion referral centre, did pregnancy tests and, most importantly, could have general meetings every Monday night. One hundred women came to these weekly discussions and some sort of action would always come out of them.
For instance, when discussing how women were treated patronizingly by doctors (mostly men), we decided to start a women's health centre run by women, for women and with sympathetic women doctors. Also, a group was formed called The Body Politic. I was in this. I decided to do a re-hash of that old pamphlet on contraception, this time called "What every woman should know".
This was expanded to a broadsheet with added information which we handed out free at school gates. We immediately got into trouble when one mother complained to the police because we had said that being a lesbian was a good contraceptive (which it is !).
We had a visit from the vice squad, but we had prepared a way out of situations like this by creating a fictitious woman called Jenny Kirk. We simply told the police the instigator of the material had gone interstate. Jenny came in very handy in tight situations.
How do I feel about all this now? I live with a low-level anger at the way the media have done such a good job at burying our history/herstory, burying the name by referring continually to the women's movement, never the women's liberation movement. We still do not have those basic demands — abortion is still a crime.
Women's liberation was always revolutionary, not about getting women into parliament, into boardrooms, breaking glass ceilings. We were about ordinary women, students, housewives, working-class women getting together, working out what was wrong in consciousness-raising groups, empowering ourselves together, getting out on the streets, uniting for mass actions and doing things.
We badly need to revive the women's liberation movement — to start that third wave, rolling back the backlash. Three students started the second wave at Adelaide Uni. What could 300 do?
Finally, about differences. We wouldn't be human if we didn't have them. Work through them at this conference in a spirit of sisterhood. That was our strength before. Sisterhood is powerful. Come out ready to unite and fight for that third wave I've been waiting for.