BY MARIA VOUKELATOS
SYDNEY — One hundred women wheel 1950s prams, wearing neatly styled hair, respectable knee-length dresses and big smiles on their faces. It sounds like a scene from a B-grade documentary from 40 years ago telling women of the joys of domestic servitude, but it isn't. This was one of the lead floats in this year's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
The main theme of the 2001 Mardi Gras was opposition to last year's attempt by the federal Coalition government to exclude lesbians and single mothers from access to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) services. Floats included lesbians and their friends with placards calling for "same for all" and "social justice".
Prime Minister John Howard's intention is to exclude all unmarried women from rearing children discourage all social relations that differ from the nuclear family. That is why the government invested $16.5 million in a "National Families Strategy" last year to teach couples what the "perfect" relationship is.
Howard's "perfect family" is oppressive to all women, as well as to all gay men. Like most capitalist politicians, he uses images of "ideal" families to justify forcing women to take responsibility for feeding, clothing and caring for most of the population. The family under capitalism is an economic unit which takes responsibility for the care and rearing of children.
To justify this as "natural", capitalism needs people to be raised in units with traditional gender-role models — a heterosexual couple with a male "breadwinner", a "homemaker"(who may also be in the paid work force) and children. Any relationship that challenges this "natural" arrangement poses a threat to social stability.
The attack on IVF access for women not in nuclear families is just one of many attempts to force women back into such families. In the last five years, Howard has used changes to the tax system, combined with massive cuts to child-care funding to make it increasingly impractical for women to stay in full-time paid employment. As a result, thousands of women have moved from full-time into part-time jobs. Changes to the Family Court have increased the hardship experienced by women who dare to break up their marriages.
The demand for IVF access for lesbians and single women challenges the idea that lesbians are unnatural and unfit parents. It challenges the idea that women should only be concerned with being happy homemakers and blushing brides.
It was therefore extremely disappointing to see the Mardi Gras float embracing a "pink" version of the nuclear family.
The 1950s was a period of a huge propaganda offensive glorifying women as "homemakers". This was a backlash against the mass involvement of women in the paid work force during World War II.
During the war, images of women as strong, independent and equal to men were common in the media. But in the 1950s women were no longer needed in the work force. The images of strong, independent women disappeared to be replaced by happy housewives entranced by their whitegoods.
Given this, the contingent of women at Mardi Gras all wheeling prams and donning 1950s-style clothes and hairdos seemed to be attempting to reclaim the traditional idea of the happy homemaker for lesbians.
Fighting for the right to have children, and full equality with heterosexuals, shouldn't be confused with glorifying reactionary, capitalist and inherently homophobic institutions. Fighting for IVF access for all women is a fight against the idea that there is one "natural" way to raise children. It is not a fight for lesbian versions of idealised 1950s families.
Gay men and lesbians will not advance their struggle for full equality with heterosexuals by embracing John Howard's nuclear family ideal. The nuclear family is not a "natural" arrangement for the procreation of the human species, but an social institution that is based upon the oppression of women and the stigmatisation of homosexuality.