How I was radicalised in the War on Women – Peta Swarbrick

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

I was brought up by my step mother who was an unusual woman for the time in that she had travelled widely and already been in business before she met my Pommie divorcee dad, got knocked up and decided to marry him and take on his Miracle Whip family ( take two kids, one boy aged 7 one girl aged 4, add water, and stir).
My father was away alot. My mother was an unsentimental, not over demonstrative  woman who was open about not being that enamoured of small ( read boring) children. She married my father and was consigned to a life of packing up the household and following him to a new posting as he progressed his geology career. She worked here and there, could turn her hand to anything and needed to be out of the house in whatever state, territory or country, to stay sane.
We were well adjusted independent kids. I felt loved because my rescue dog amigdala would not accept any other narrative than we were in a stable, safe and secure environment. My mother was praised for her fortitude, her enterprise, her patience and her independence. She went to Flinders Uni in 1977 and studied politics, and arguments in our house in Adelaide got fiery. We heard my father call my mother a “shit stirring rat bag”. I loved the idea of being bolshie myself, I tried it out on my brother – whispering it to him on the bench seat of the company Ford. I knew if he dobbed my father had nowhere to go. It became a family joke and it made me proud of my mother’s courage
I grew up in a household dedicated to continuing education. My father was from a well to do carters who blindly dismissed cars and backed horses to their dynastic ruin. My father was a PhD and petrified of black sliding if the next gen didn’t have the security of a University education. We were a family that discussed ideas, where a degree was an unspoken expectation. Yet it was also a household in which my father said he wanted me to wait for a few years after my 17th birthday to go for m P’s because girls are not mature enough to be behind the wheel of a car at that age. Both my older brother and my father were the only drivers in my family who had been involved in an accident. I was furious. I know it was bullshit but I did not have the verbal cutlery, or the understanding of the issues or frankly the emotional resources to demolish my father’s outrageous sexism in the way I burned to. It was a salutary lesson, and I began to look at him differently. My step mother said nothing.
So the point of this backgrounding is that I am from a well off, educated, upwardly mobile middle class family where there was very little obvious sexism. My step mother held her own and there was no explicit belittling or criticism, in fact if you had asked me who was in charge I would have confidently explained “my mother wears the pants” because I thought in sexist tropes in the 1980’s.
I went to Uni, I did women’s studies. I didn’t protest or rally because it seemed to us that Germaine and Gloria and Betty and Angela had fought the fight, seen law changed, enfranchised women into the economy and we were all going to wear Enjoli and HAVE IT ALL. We lived with males in share houses and made them cook roasts and wash the dishes, we dropped them when they cheated on us, and we said something when they got drunk and got violent with our friends. We formed groups at college called Clit Soc, bought double beds we hid from our parents, got the pill  on campus, and even had abortions all by ourselves. Of course I was a feminist! A feminist who wore and arm full of “rape bracelets” when I went out to clubs, so hilarious. I used my stillettos as knuckle shivs walking home at night. I judged the slutty girls for having bigger tits, better hair, longer legs and having sex. But I challenged men left right and centre and I was MOUTHY and BOLSHIE and felt I was empowered and protected by this attitude.
I worked for my mother and then my father joined her new company, I graduated and moved in with my boyfriend and helped my parents start a new It company. I experienced sexism in the workplace but it came from my own father, so it was a little complicated and I unconsciously chose not to register it as such. It was “just my father”. I was successful, I earned more than my boyfriend who then became my husband, we shared domestic duties and I never felt I was oppressed. Not even a little bit. Many things did not make sense to me but I didn’t connect them with the intrinsically misogynistic world I lived in because that notion could not co-exist with my own self idealisation as a smart, resourceful, educated, empowered PERSON. Not just a “woman” but an equally enfranchised and valuable participant in our open and modern economy, free to keep my own name, earn my own money, own my own house and exist in my own right.
My daughter was born, and my husband took leave without pay and spent a year being house husband. He was such a rare breed it spawned a radio series and a book and the adoration of fawning women everywhere. I got to work 60 hrs a week, shop, clean, express, fight off mastitis and be told constantly what a lucky woman I was and how amazing my husband was. I felt guilty for thinking ugly angry thoughts because I put that down to being a tired cranky bitch. I felt something was wrong but I could not see it, I could not articulate it, but I could feel it, deep in my waters. It reverberated around me as my brilliant cohort of women friends tried to solve the conundrum of when to get pregnant, how to afford mortgages, how to juggle careers, and negotiate child care they could afford. I saw friends with careers equal to their male partners become neutralised by motherhood overnight. I saw these apparently long buried “gender roles” resurface with a vengeance. Confusing when everyone had told me these expectations were long gone (it was 1999 for god’s sake). There was a cognitive dissonance around me  I didn’t feel I could explain, especially with a stay at home teacher husband and my stellar IT sales exec career.
We moved away from the big metropolis to spawn baby number two and live on a teacher’s salary. I stayed at home until the credit card blew out and I felt number two was well settled in early learning. My friends and I loved the organic nature of daily mothering, but we hated the constant inference that “staying at home” was lying on the couch eating timtams and watching Oprah whilst the kids played quietly and went to sleep on demand. My daughter’s friends all had mothers with similar situations, mostly working full or part time, professionals with high levels of education and the high expectations of success at school and in life that comes with that. My career took off, my husband swapped  family unfriendly teaching for flexi public service work, I enjoyed my freedom from regular domestic patterns due to my work hours, my husband adored spending time with his kids. Life was pretty bloody good.
My daughter was born a happy, curious, observant, keenly intelligent geek with an almost photographic memory. From the age of 3 when she started to read, a PhD seemed to be fait accompli. Her friends come from similar home cultures – educated, travelled, liberal (in the right way) progressive, egalitarian and privileged. She is proud to be smart and she is completely focused on success at whatever she does. She has no sense that there is any barrier to any career she wishes to pursue. Unlike my father I have purposefully refrained from projecting any expectations onto her. Her own vision has never been for anything but University, and with two with multiple PhDs and Masters in the family it is only to be expected.
Privileged is what we are. I was so glad of that privilege. I have always felt that the gifts of privilege being intelligent, healthy, mentally strong, mentally strong, well informed, well travelled, well read, meant that I was an inoculated and protected from the evils of ignorance. I just blindly believed that I was blessed with too many resources to be affected by sexism, as would my daughter be, just as my son would be free from being a sexist. Surrounded by privilege and like minded people,  I was fully confident that my children would make their way in the world unencumbered by old prejudices. I think I really believed that sexism existed in individuals not fully awake, people without the benefit of education, it was a personal faults left over from the victory of feminism over systemic sexist ideology.
I thought I was a feminist. I thought I had inherited a new world. I thought that I was a strong, independent, woman with equal opportunity and value in my society. There were some things that rankled and some things that that didn’t add up. Like any proper woman, I understood that I needed to be grateful, and patient and ask nicely and earn my place at the table with reason, logic and infinite understanding. This was the way of the world, it wasn’t any kind of conspiracy, I knew that women were emotional, hormonal, cyclical, unreliable with periods and emotional needs. I knew women could be strident, and vain, and obsessed with their looks, I wasn’t one of those and I hoped to god my daughter wasn’t going to be either. I knew I needed to look good and be feminine, sexy but not slutty. I knew that if women wanted to be taken seriously then they need to work harder and smarter so no man could deny her merit. But I wasn’t going to be pushed around and I wasn’t going to take any crap. I was a woman in a post-feminist world, so in situations where feminism was required I would bring it, but really what need was there?
Life goes on as it does, parents worked and shopped and cleaned, children grew and learned and became the people encoded in their DNA and shaped by their environment. My daughter matured physically around thirteen, developed unknown interests in hair, earrings, t-shirts with funny slogans from Jay Jays, jeans from Dottie and dresses from Cotton On. She and her friends started to shut their bedroom doors, send each other funny emails on their school laptops, throw themselves into local gymnastics and form rowing squads. My daughter showed a wonderful aptitude for the flute and music and maths. We loved her serious, daggy geeky year 7 friends. We congratulated ourselves as her parents for the happy, friendly child, with killer concentration and an assuredly bright future. Teen tantrums, and the natural separation bad behaviour towards me was short and embarassingly not much to winge about. My ability to contribute to facebook “teen angst” posts, featuring gnashed teeth, cranky mothers and lots of wine jokes was limited by the a smooth transition to a new and excitingly mature relationship with my woman-girl daughter. Smugly silent, self satisfied and quite self congratulatory, I felt I was some mother, possibly better than my own, possibly the best one that I know.
Until a walk to the shops brought the whole facade crashing down in front of me. My daughter returned from a walk to the local shops one day,a little quiet, but then as a high functioning introvert she is always a little quiet. I was very pleased with this rather independent act. Walking anywhere in our town is fairly uncommon after you stop travelling with the primary school walking bus, and my daughter loves public transport not so much a fan of the bike so a walk to the shops to buys something with her own money was notable. The next day I suggested she walk to the shops for me, and I would give her some money to buy herself something. She went a bit quiet and said she didn’t want to walk to the shops again. I asked her why not? I was quite bemused thinking she was so unhappy to walk it was too much?? What she told me never occurred to me…she had been cat called. Yelled at by several men from the window of a car going at normal speed. It was the first time this had happened to her.
At the time I worked a lot of late nights and weekends. I didn’t do facebook, I didn’t read the papers, I caught some morning radio national. I wasn’t reading feminist commentary, I wasn’t tuned in, why would I be? We lived in a world where rape happened sure, and some women didn’t get equal pay but basically that would sort itself out and all women could expect to be and be treated equally and with equal respect. At first I was shocked, in my street? Near my shops? Why are these SORT of people in my neighbourhood? I was angry at these jerks, I was pissed off that these uneducated, ignorant, bogans had disrespected my daughter. I was furious, I shouted “Did you yell back at them, tell them to piss off?” She was silent, and she looked at me, she was angry at my response.

 

 In hindsight I am sure my anger made her defensive, it was no doubt redolent of the implied blame that we all get when abused, heckled, cat called, groped, or ogled. I asked her again ” Did you tell them to piss off?” Her eyes got bigger, and more serious, and she looked at me hard and said “What, and invite worse?”. Those words hit me like a truck, a had almost a wave of nausea, my blood pounded in my ears and I felt my vision blur as the implications of these words struck me. My privileged, educated, loved and adored daughter was telling me she understood without every having heard a word from me that she lived in a culture of rape. That the omnipresence of this culture that starts with the objectification of girls from the moment they are named and gendered, and continues until the day they die had seeped into my daughter, without my knowledge and without my understanding that it is a thing of the present not the past. How did my learn this truth universally known to every woman who dares to take up a public space, that they are fair game, that they must accept and that to antagonise, reject or ridicule any man could lead to physical harm? AND THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO OR UNDO.
I had lived smugly, safely, stupidly believing that I had inherited a world free of sexism, maybe not free of all of its vestiges but a world where these things were on their way out, no longer tolerated, no longer accepted or practiced thanks to laws and education…In that horrible moment of self awareness I felt I had failed her, I had failed myself and I had spent years doing nothing to make the world a better fairer safer place for my daughter. It was the day that I peeled back a corner of the matrix and started to see the complex, and frightening machinery behind the facade or equality. That day I understood that the War on Women is real, and that feminism has more work to do, in way less obvious places and with many more obstacles. I understood from that day that say say a feminist is radical is to say that she is vocal, and will not stay quiet, will not accept that the fight is won and is willing to offend, alienate, agitate, argue and fight (like a girl!). Today I am a proud, radical, nasty, shouty, angry, persistent, unrepentant feminist. I am now a more informed feminist. I understand more about the structure of the patriarchy. I understand how toxic masculinity robs men of opportunities and keeps them locked in an often times destructive gender binary. I am learning more about the intersectionality that feminism must embrace to be both authentic and effective. Most importantly I have identified and embraced my own internalised oppression, and how crucial this understanding is to see the whole picture and why 50 years after the second wave and several generations after “women’s liberation” we are still raising our children to objectify and be objectified.

 

 

Go Back