‘Grateful slaves’ or ‘self-made women’: a matter of choice or policy?[1]
Clare Burton Memorial Lecture 2001
Belinda Probert
School of Social Science and Planning
RMIT University
In this lecture I want to talk about why progress towards gender equality appears to have stalled in Australia, and to outline a series of questions that I think we need to confront if we are to break through the current impasse around women and employment. I propose to focus primarily on the kind of ‘gender culture’ we have helped to create over the last twenty or so years of feminist reforms, and the contradictions and ambivalence that are contained within it. By gender culture I mean the norms and values that underpin what come to be defined as the ‘desirable’ forms of gender relations in a particular society, and the accepted ideas about the division of labour between men and women. I want to argue that effective policy development has run aground on submerged ideas about motherhood and domesticity, and a failure to sustain the family as a serious object of social policy. ‘We have attempted either to cater for everyone’s image of the family under the policy buzzword, choice, or, alternatively and often simultaneously, to confine the family to the private sphere beyond the view of policy’[2].
But perhaps I need to start by defending my assertion that progress towards gender equality has stalled. There are, after all, visible dimensions on which progress continues to be made. Right here in this hall there is probably strong evidence of one important trend, and that is the increasing share of managerial, professional and technical jobs going to women. And this in turn reflects another important indicator of progress – namely the increasing proportion of women undertaking tertiary education. Since 1989 there have been more women than men enrolled in Australian universities, and in the high status areas of law and medicine, for example, little gender inequity in enrolments remains.
Such data immediately draws attention to less happy trends, however. The major contributor to the increased polarization in household incomes in Australia is the presence of well-paid women in dual income households. On the down side we have increasing numbers of households with no one in employment, and the rapid growth of the working poor - women like Emma Barclay who has three children and takes home $337 a week for her full-time job cleaning rooms in an up-market hotel in Melbourne[3]. We have also seen the ballooning of casual, part-time and contract employment – types of employment in which women are strongly over-represented[4]. It is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about the economic situation of ‘women’ as such.
But even when we compare men and women who work full-time we find that the pay gap has started to widen again, having hovered for many years at about 16 per cent. This was the topic of the first Clare Burton Memorial Lecture, elegantly analysed by Rosemary Hunter[5]. And with the privatization of pensions, the profound inadequacy of women’s superannuation provisions will become an increasingly important challenge in the near future.
And as for provisions intended to make it easier for women and men to combine work and family responsibilities, the evidence clearly suggests that it is a case of one step forward and two steps back, with employees reporting that they are finding it harder rather than easier to combine them[6]. Good workplace policy development is being undermined by other changes such as longer working hours, increased childcare costs, loss of award protection, and the failure of enterprise bargaining and individual contracts to give women’s needs and interests higher priority. We should not be surprised at the Australia’s declining fertility rate. As Peter McDonald puts it, young Australians in their 20s ‘learn about the market at first hand. They learn to be risk averse. They experience a system that does not value or reward those who have children. Indeed, it very obviously penalizes those who have children, particularly women.’[7]
But where should we focus our concern about the stalled gender equality agenda? Some of our present difficulties undoubtedly reflect the more general phenomenon of growing inequality in an increasingly marketised society, and the deliberate reduction in scope for public policy and government regulation within the neo-liberal political agenda. For example, comparisons between different countries shows that Australia has relatively low levels of gender pay inequity and this is largely the result of our historically centralized wage fixing system. The decentralization of this system is widening pay gaps generally, and gender pay gaps more specifically.
But in this lecture I do not want to focus directly on what we might call the gender system – that is, the structures of our labour market and our welfare state. Rather than elaborating on feminist critiques of the Howard government’s approach to the labour market and welfare reform – which could take us all night – I want to talk about the reasons why we are letting them get away with it. I want to talk about the gender culture in Australia today, not because I wish to privilege culture, let alone attitudes, in any causal analysis. Attitudes are shaped by historical structures and must, themselves, be explained. But it is also the case that culture and attitudes must be taken seriously if we are to understand this loss of momentum in the gender equality agenda, and the existence of visible and damaging conflicts between women over family life and the care of children[8].
This is, in part, an argument for attempting to articulate more self-consciously the distinctive nature of Australia’s gender arrangement, and particularly its cultural dimensions. And it is also an argument that we should guard against the commonsense temptation to assume that we are witnessing more or less universal shifts in the advanced economies from the breadwinner model household to something like a symmetrical household model. There are very substantial differences between countries with similar levels of economic development in the way women participate in the labour market – and this is linked to the way households organize themselves and the care of children. These differences have been analysed comparatively, but generally through a focus on employment policies and welfare state structures.[9] But these shape and are shaped by culture – or by gender ideologies.
So what does Australia’s gender culture look like at the start of this new century? What exactly has changed in our beliefs about the sexual division of labour in society – about what men should do and what women should do? How far has this culture changed since the heyday of the breadwinner model family in the 1950s?
To answer this question I want to use some of the material gathered from a large scale interviewing project which was designed to capture the way different groups of men and women experienced their working and family lives in the 1950s and the 1990s[10]. In both the work and family literatures the 1950s are regularly counterposed to the 1990s along several dimensions. We have moved from Fordist production systems to post-Fordist flexible specialization; from the bourgeois family based on a traditional male breadwinner and female homemaker to the de-gendered individualisers of ‘risk society’[11], or at least some version of a less gendered household partnership.
We have many objective indicators of these changes – the collapse of full-time on-going employment and the rise of casual and contract jobs; the rapidly increasing labour market participation rates of married women and especially women with young children; the dramatic increase in divorce; changes in the social security system that encourage wives to think of themselves as individual claimants (or rather individual job-seekers or workers for the dole) rather than as primarily dependents of a wage-earner or unemployed man.
But we have much less evidence about the way people have in fact experienced these changes, and the sense they have made of them - the new narratives they have developed or adopted to make sense of them.[12] In this sense the cultural shifts remain remarkably unproblematised. Our research was designed to develop the kind of rich description that is possible with lengthy qualitative interviews. We were looking for old and new narratives about working life and family life.
With my colleagues, John Murphy and John Wiseman, we have conducted about 170 in-depth interviews. About half were with men and women who had young children in 1956; the other half were with men and women who had young children in 1996. They came from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. They were all asked to talk about their experience of employment, about their role in the family, about how they think children are best cared for, about their views on being good mothers and good fathers, and about government support for childcare or parenting at home, and several other things too. And what they told us allows us to provide some depth and richness to accounts of the gender culture in Australia in the 1950s and the 1990s.
Gender Culture
The concept of gender culture has several elements, and there are three that I would argue are the most important.
The first element of any gender culture is the set of ideas that define the social spheres through which men and women should be integrated into society, and the way these spheres are related to each other. For example, is it expected that both men and women will have economically productive roles or is it expected only of men? Can women expect to be socially recognized primarily as carers rather than as direct producers? And is the productive sphere seen as equal to or more important than the caring sphere?
The second element of any gender culture concerns the way relationships between men and women are constructed and legitimated. These can vary from relations of one-sided dependency, to mutual dependency or individual autonomy. Are women expected to be dependent on men? Are men and women increasingly dependent on each other to maintain viable households? Do welfare policies allow for mothers to be independent of individual men, as in many Scandinavian social democracies, and how is this viewed by society at large? Are single mothers seen as citizens in need of social support or as escaped dependents?
The third significant element of the gender culture concerns the way society determines what are to be the legitimate social spheres within which caring work should be carried out. These range from the family, to the state, to the market, or to some kind of intermediate sector. Even within the Scandinavian social democracies where a major role for the state is widely accepted, feelings vary as to whether the care of children should be socialized or families be publicly supported to do the caring themselves. The significance of this element of the gender culture has, I think, been underestimated in Australia. Yet it has been argued that in fact it is ‘cultural models of motherhood’ that form the central element of particular gender cultures.[13] And I think this argument is born out in an analysis of changes in the Australian gender culture.
These three elements of the gender culture can be combined together in any particular society to produce a particular culture – or ideology of gender. We should not assume that they are necessarily combined together to produce cultural coherence. It is entirely possible to have alternative or competing cultural value systems. This in turn may produce ambivalence or even conflict.
Australia’s gender culture in the 1950s.
So, if we begin with the question of the dominant beliefs about how men and women should be integrated into society, what can we say about the 1950s? Well, perhaps there are not many surprises here. Our interviews confirm the existence of a remarkably homogenous and widely shared view about this, revolving around almost stereotypical conceptions of men as breadwinners, and women as mothers and homemakers attached to individual breadwinners. Of the twenty-nine men from this age group who were interviewed, all except one had established families on the traditional division of labour. The exception was a working class man - a carpenter – who described his household as far more symmetrical than that, as his wife had always had to work. As he described her, ‘she’s been a good battler; she’s worked all the way through’. And interestingly, they shared outdoor and indoor domestic chores. For the rest of the men, they were breadwinners and providers, and this took precedence over everything else. They described women as being good at different things, primarily the bringing up of children. The model of social integration that underpinned their views was highly gendered, and based on different and complimentary social roles for men and women. Or, as an accountant described it, ‘It was an implied agreement that I was the breadwinner and she was the little lady in the kitchen’.
If we turn to the way dependencies between men and women were described, there was overwhelming acceptance that women were financially dependent on individual men, with almost every man believing that women should give up work when the first baby arrived. As one plant engineer put it. ‘If you can’t afford to get a wife, then don’t get one’. Indeed, a builder carpenter told us that ‘It was an insult if your wife worked’. Fathers should be breadwinners, mediators, organizers and ‘helpers’ in the house - ‘lending a hand’ was a commonly used expression - although one teacher told us that the role of the father was ‘to work, then come home for tea’.
Central to these narratives about the inevitability of gender difference was the view that children need their mothers. And as one railway worker put it, ‘It’s not good for other people to care for your children’. It is this fact that requires women to cease being workers. Men do not say that they need women to look after them (although this is indeed the corollary – like a bonus that comes with their wives caring for their children).
This is not the place to elaborate further on this research into the gender culture of the 1950s, but this extreme separation of spheres did of course give men power over women. Women were objectively vulnerable, but not necessarily unhappy. Some men did indeed see themselves as the authority figure, but others were close to their children, and defined their marriages as real partnerships.
As for the women describing the 1950s, they too accepted without question the notion of fathers earning and mothers caring. The defining moment for them too was the birth of children and the requirement that they give up work. (Although many look back on this in bewilderment – ‘it was just what you did’, you had ‘no choice’.) The power of the gender culture was perhaps most clearly revealed in the experiences of women who, for one reason or another, did not manage to make the right partnership. The most poignant of these was Mrs D from Benalla. She told me how, fearful of ‘being left on the shelf at 23’, she met, and married after 5 weeks, a policeman, who drank, stayed out, and then had an affair. She left him, and with her mother and her two very young children came to Melbourne where she worked as a cleaner in private houses (taking the older child with her), and then as a railway porteress for ten years, sitting on the platform waiting for each train to come in and leave, not allowed to have a book or knitting in between. The Catholic Church, to which she belonged, urged her to give up her children for adoption, and to claim she was a widow. All this in comfortable Armadale, not so long ago. After ten years on the same railway platform, a solicitor who used the station told her she should not be doing such work, and got her an office job. Inspired, she got herself a night job with the TAB to go with it, working all day and then from 6 to 10.45 at night for 15 years. She retired with only with 10 years superannuation.
As for the sphere in which caring work should be carried out, this was clearly to be the family, and within the family, it was unequivocally women’s work. While many men ‘helped’, just as many refused on principle, both middle class and working class. Mrs L. had been a nurse from a solidly middle class family before she married an engineer who refused to let her work even when the children were in school. As she put it: ‘Obviously, keeping your wife in order is number one with that sort of man, and the way to do that -you don’t let them get any money of their own’. Nor did he do anything for the children. It was ‘cut and dried, man’s work and woman’s work’. He was ‘authoritarian and distant’, a ‘breadwinner full stop. He did nothing. Never picked up a baby, never even took our first born down the street with him on a Saturday morning until he was 4 years old’. (It was her husband who told us that if you can’t afford to keep a wife then you shouldn’t get one.)