Summers - Damned Whores and Gods Police

Damned Whores and Gods Police

ANNE SUMMERS was born in Deniliquin, New South Wales but grew up in Adelaide. She attended Cabra Convent and the University of Adelaide before moving to Sydney, where she became active in the womens movement, obtained a PhD and began her writing career. In 1975, after the publication of this book, she joined The National Times as a feature writer where she won a Walkley Award. In 1979 she was appointed political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. In 1983 she was appointed to head the Office of the Status of Women in the Prime Ministers Department. From 1987 to 1989 in New York she was editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine and co-owner of Matilda Publications Inc., which owned Ms. and Sassy magazines.

She returned to Australia to become a political consultant to Prime Minister Paul Keating. From 1993 to 1997 she was editor of Good Weekend magazine. In 1989 she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and to women.

Anne is the author of Her Story: Australian Women in Print (1980), with Margaret Bettison; Gamble for Power (1983); Ducks on the Pond (1999); The End of Equality (2003); On Luck (2008); The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love (2009); and The Misogyny Factor (2013). She is the editor and publisher of Anne Summers Reports. She lives in Sydney.

[T]he damned whores the moment that the[y] got below fel a fighting amonst one a nother and Capt Meridith order the Sergt. not to part them but to let them fight it out ...

Lt Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, The Journals and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark 17871792

If Her Majestys Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. If the paternal Government wish to entitle itself to that honoured appellation, it must look to the materials it may send as a nucleus for the formation of a good and great people. For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good, without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called Gods police wives and little children good and virtuous women.

Caroline Chisholm, Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered, 1847

Damned Whores andGodsPolice

The colonisation of women in Australia

AnneSummers

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Anne Summers 2016

First published 1975. This new edition published 2016.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Summers, Anne, 1945 author

Title: Damned Whores and Gods Police: The colonisation of women in Australia

ISBN: 9781742234908 (paperback)

9781742242361 (ebook)

9781742247731 (epdf)

Notes: Includes index

Subjects: Womens rights Australia

Women Australia History

Dewey Number: 305.420994

Design Jo Pajor-Markus

Cover design Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

Cover image Portrait of Anne Summers 1974 by Carol Jerrems (19491980), gelatin silver photograph. Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Purchased with funds provided by Tim Fairfax AC 2012. Reproduced with kind permission of Ken Jerrems and the estate of Lance Jerrems.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

To my mother

Acknowledgements

Over the past four decades hundreds of thousands of people have read this book. They have talked and argued about it, studied it, shared it with friends and family members. It became a consciousness-raiser and a call to arms for at least two generations. This kept the book alive, even for those sad seven years when it was actually out of print. So much so that in September 2015 we held a three-day conference about the book, addressing its impact and the question of what is still needed to achieve equality for women in Australia. Not bad for a book that, technically, did not exist.

I am most indebted, therefore, to all of you who have read this book and talked about it. Without you, we would not be back in print, in a volume that brings together each of the previous editions, with their updates that took stock of where we were in 1994 and in 2002, and which tries to assess where we are now, forty years on. Its been an amazing journey. We started it in 1975 and now in 2016 we are still going. Thank you all for being part of it.

I also thank Kathy Bail and Phillipa McGuinness of NewSouth for their courageous decision to undertake the hugely ambitious task of publishing a book that has now grown to over 750 pages. I salute them for going where other publishers feared to tread. I also thank Emily Stewart for her meticulous edit and Sandy Cull for her inspired cover.

In 1974 Carol Jerrems photographed me for a book of portraits of Australian women. She was just starting to make her mark as a talented photographer and I was struggling to finish this book. She took a series of pictures, most of them in the room where I did my writing. Six years later, Carol died aged just 30, but she left behind an extraordinary body of work. Most of her portfolio was portraits of women, young and old, most of them not well known, many of them, like me, just starting out. Carol caught something in me that day. I look ruminative, brooding, slightly sceptical. Its as if I am wondering where this whole women thing is going to end up. I still am, so it is fitting that on the cover of this new edition is the young me, photographed by that insightful young woman.

Major institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, collect Jerrems work and I wish to thank them and Carols brother, Ken Jerrems, for giving permission to use this photograph.

A number of people helped me bring this updated book into being. Rowena Johns researched the updates to the Time-line of womens achievements with flair and creativity; Foong Ling Kongs expert eye made sure we had not forgotten anyone; Dennis Altman suggested some additional achievements; Meredith Burgmann and Philippa Hall provided last-minute research assistance on equal pay; and Jenna Price, in being a driving force behind the Damned Whores and Gods Police at 40 conference at UTS in September 2015, helped create the momentum to have this book back in print which, fortunately, became unstoppable. I thank them each most sincerely. Without the assistance of Christine Howard I would not be able to manage my workload. My gratitude to her is boundless. Every writer is better off for having a soulmate and a sounding board and I am very fortunate, and thankful, to have Chip Rolley, my companion in life and love.

Introduction to 2016 edition

W e have changed a lot. But we have not changed enough.

On the morning of Monday, 21 September 2015 I stood in front of a capacity crowd in a stylish new lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney and prepared to deliver the first keynote of a three-day conference to mark 40 years since the publication of