REVIEW BY PAT BREWER
The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women's Choices in 21st Century Australia
Anne Summers
Random House, 2003
336 pages, $39.95
It is unusual to see a scathing condemnation by a prominent government adviser on the state of women's equality, and ways it is being eroded. Yet Anne Summers' new book, The End of Equality, does just this. It outlines what Summers calls "the breeding creed" — a shift in focus from women's equality and choice to highlight only their role in families and motherhood.
While Summers' attack focuses mainly on the dramatic changes since the election of the Howard coalition government in 1996, she also criticises the ALP and business' lack of commitment to advance equality. Further, she rails against the increasing numbers of women who have gained positions of power and who are failing to advance policies to improve the situation of women, or even oppose those that make it worse. She labels these women "political eunuchs", contrasting them to the women in the 1970s and 1980s who established many of the government policies which are now being dismantled.
Summers conducted focus group consultations with women living in different rural and urban situations. She outlines their dilemmas: trying to manage careers, child rearing, care and support in a climate of individual blame and guilt. She locates these dilemmas in the changing ideologies and policies that are making the choices more difficult. Most clearly, she outlines the removal or silencing of bodies set up to collect and analyse information about the progress of women. Such analysis is needed to evaluate the progress, or regression, in women's quality of life.
This book provides excellent documentation of the reversal of many of the steps taken towards women's equality. Summers outlines the erosion of the movement towards equal wages during the past 10 years — to the point where women's total average earnings are just 66% of men's. More women are living in poverty than a decade ago. Women are increasingly economically marginalised: whether because they don't have access to full-time jobs; or, like rapidly growing numbers of women, they rely on low-paid casual work; or because, as sole parents, they rely on welfare; or they are without superannuation because of limited time in the work force.
This marginalisation is made worse by a lack of vital support services. Summers documents in detail the inadequate number of available child-care places and the high cost of existing services. This is coupled with a detailed review of Coalition government policies under the "breeding creed": tax breaks are given to families in which women do not work, while paid maternity leave is rejected.
These policies are justified as ways to address the decline in Australia's fertility rate, now around 1.75 children per woman. But given the overwhelming sacrifices women are forced to make without paid maternity leave and affordable and available child care, it is not surprising that up to 25% of Australian women are choosing careers and economic and social independence over childbearing and a double workload.
Summers also draws attention to the barriers to women's careers. At the top end of the market, women hold less than 10% of board and senior executive positions, in a "misogynist corporate culture of senior management levels".
The third thrust to the range of attacks on women is the growth in reportage of sexual and domestic violence. Summers argues that this underpins equal opportunity by threatening the physical and psychological wellbeing of women. It is hard to tell when the increase in reports of violence is the result of broader definitions of violence (won by feminist campaigns) and women's increased confidence to make the reports, or by an increase in the attacks.
There is a useful chapter dealing with the Coalition government's dismantling of programs designed to overcome the accumulated heritage of disadvantage of women, and to evaluate and monitor their progress towards equality.
The government's attack on these programs was combined with abolishing grants to women's organisations and lobby groups in the community. Only after major protest, was half of these restored — but the funding was dependent on a proviso specifying no public comments without government approval.
In this way, a pall of silence has been imposed on information concerning the situation of women in Australia, while a public campaign to assert that women don't need special treatment is waged. This campaign now includes arguing that men and boys are disadvantaged. This underpins the claim that the Family Court is biased against fathers. No wonder women are confused, self blaming and guilt-ridden when the load of juggling family care, relationships and work proves overwhelming and exhausting!
But the book has several major weaknesses. It never deals explicitly with the reasons why both the ALP and the Coalition government are rolling back women's equality.
Particularly from the 1990s onward, both parties have embraced neoliberalism, and its accompanying privatisation, profits and cuts to welfare and wages. Women have been left to pick up and deal with the social misery left by the massive erosion to public spending on welfare, pensions, child care, education and health. As relatively new entrants to the work force, women have been the main victims of the massive casualisation of the work force.
Summers talks of the Paul Keating-led Labor government listening to her as the women's adviser to the 1993 election, but not the 1996 election. But she ignores the fact that the Keating government introduced enterprise bargaining in 1992 — the major factor in the decline in full-time wages for women, beginning the regression of women's wages.
Summers ignores another major factor. When she castigates women in public office and executive positions from the 1990s onwards for not championing women's rights as compared to those of the 1970s and 1980s, she does not mention that prior to the 1990s there existed a mobilised women's movement, campaigning on a range of issues. This no longer exists today.
While in part, this reflects the success of the movement, the social forces needed to defend and mobilise against the attacks are demobilised.
There is another aspect to this. It was never going to be enough to get more women into positions of power, where they are incorporated into these structures and often conservatised. There is pressure on those women who succeed not to rock the boat since it would place their career on the line. At the same time, the increasing dependence of women's services on government funding makes them increasingly vulnerable to political pressure to modify their demands, and in the case of the Coalition government gag, silences them.
Summers also ignores the question of class. The word is not even mentioned in the index. She does talk about how the majority of women are affected by the attacks, and describes the disproportionate impact of poverty on women. However the skew of policy to the benefit of middle-class and wealthier women is not discussed. She does not really examine the question of tax cuts for the wealthy and business. Her emphasis on the failures of women to break the glass ceiling into the top levels of executives, boards and CEO positions has undue weight, in comparison to the class impact of attacks.
The lack of a class analysis is evident in her strategy for change. Essentially it is lobby, lobby, lobby — email and write letters to MPs and senators, leaders of parties, newspapers; call talk-back radio; boycott companies unfair to women; all these are individual responses and may impel women into taking some action. But this is no strategy to turn back the attacks. Women need to act collectively and mobilise others. That is how women's rights were won by the first and second waves of the women's movement and that is what is necessary today in order to win equality.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, January 21, 2004.
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