Katie Holmes - Freedom Bound II

FREEDOM BOUND II

Documents on women in modern Australia

Edited by
Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake

First published 1995 by Allen & Unwin

Published 2020 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Collection, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake, 1995.
Copyright of individual pieces remains vested in original owners.

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Freedom bound II, Documents on women in modern Australia
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 86373 736 7.
1. WomenAustraliaHistorySources. I. Holmes, Katie. II. Lake,
Marilyn. III. Title: Documents on women in modern Australia.
305.420994

Set in 10/12 pt Garamond and Times by DOCUPRO, Sydney

ISBN-13: 9781863737364 (pbk)

'For the first time in history', declared an article in The Good Weekend in March 1994, 'motherhood is an option, not an imperative, for most Australian women'. The authors argued that the ability to control fertility and the development of equal opportunities in education and employment had given women 'real choices and options in their lives'. 'Today's women', the authors concluded, 'are the first generations to have such freedom'.

The documents collected here tell a different story. Decisions about motherhood and employment and marriage and choices between these options have been made by women throughout the century. Indeed, women's determination to control their fertility in the name of personal fulfilment is one of the most consistent themes of women's lives in the twentieth century. It has not, of course, been the same struggle for all. White middle-class women have been the main beneficiaries of knowledge about birth control. Aboriginal women, on the other hand, have had to fight for the right to have children and keep their families together. Too often they suffered the grief and anguish of having children forcibly removed by state authorities. Women's choices and priorities depend on their racial and ethnic identity, their class and their sexuality, as well as on how historical experience has shaped these conditions. We wish to convey the diversity of women's lives, the history of their options, and demonstrate their courage and tenacity in voicing their yearnings and demanding their rights.

Women's historical experience is easily forgotten or erased. The decisions and conflicts faced by young women today are not so new. 'The drawbacks far overrule the so-called joys of motherhood', wrote one young woman in the early 1940s to justify her decision to limit her family to two children. The records collected here chart surprising continuities in women's experience, and at the same time point out changes in the ways women conceptualised improvements in their lives. In the early decades of this century white women harnessed the idea of maternalism to argue for citizenship rights, independence and improved living and working conditions for women. By the 1970s the concept of 'liberation' provided a new framework in which women could press for more revolutionary changes. At different historical moments we hear women demanding equal pay, child-care, sexual freedom, economic independence and protection from male violence.

Women have envisaged their goals differently at different timesas autonomy, self-determination, freedom and equality. They have also manoeuvred, within personal relationships, to assert control over their bodies, their time, their work and their children. The documents collected here also reveal the historical conditions and constraints, institutionalised in legislation and arbitration judgements, for example, that shaped women's lives and the nature of their demands.

The various forms of women's activism and the conditions of their mobilisation are two of the themes explored in this collection. Petitions, songs, charters, manifestoes, all represent the diverse forms through which women voiced their demands, while poetry, letters and diaries reveal a more personal dimension to women's public activism. We wish to establish the link between personal and political experience, for women's experience of subordination provided the emotional dynamic that inspired public critique, which in turn generated a sharper analysis of their own situation and that of other women. As many of these documents suggest, when women entered public life they brought the concerns of their domestic and personal lives into public focus-the humiliations of economic dependence, the stigmatizing of lesbians, the confinements of home, the repugnance of forced sexual relations, the fear of venereal disease.

One theme to emerge from women's more personal writing is their pursuit of love and pleasure. Frequently this is expressed in women's explorations of desire, their experimentation with sexual pleasure and their negotiation of the meanings of sexuality. The boundaries between heterosexual and lesbian sexuality emerge as more fluid and contested than is often assumed, while women's experience of love finds expression through complex interpretations of the importance to women of friendship, sex, passion and intimacy. Often enough, love was experienced as both a source of pleasure and, as Lesbia Harford wrote, a tyrant that enslaved women.

The pursuit of freedom can be traced through women's reproductive struggles. Repeated child-bearing denied women a sense of fulfilment and frequently brought poverty and ill health. Abortion played a crucial role in women's fertility control, at least from the 1920s, enabling them to restrict their family size or avoid childbearing altogether. Despite the reported prevalence of abortion, however, few written sources record women's own experiences or the trauma and risk to life that it incurred. Here we draw on oral testimony to document aspects of women's lives that seldom appear in official records. The costs to women of sexual freedom, a concept central to the emergent meanings of modernity, preoccupied feminists and non-feminists alike. While many heterosexual women were enraptured by the new sexual encounters made possible by contraception, feminists, alert to the prevalence of venereal disease, the burden of large families and women's degradation as 'sex creatures', generally condemned sexual freedom as vice, equating the advancement of women with autonomy, independence and living life on a higher plane. There was a general fear that sexual desire would simply enforce women's thraldom. Not until the 1970s did a new phase of feminism incorporate sexual freedom as a woman's right, a shift that gave lesbians a new space and sense of legitimacy, but not without having to fight for their rights within the women's movement as well as beyond it.