What do we do next? The next wave of feminism.
One of the things that people might be wondering if they have gone to see the Barbie movie and they’ve come out of it saying ‘oh - that speaks to me, I understand what that’s about and I have some feelings about patriarchy, capitalism and all those things’ is what do you do about it now? The Barbie Movie opens up some questions but it doesn’t tell us what to do about it now.
The thing that I have been reflecting on is that the knowledge about how to deal with things and the way in which we can make a difference and that we can have transformation of our society is actually really well embedded in the place that I live here in Adelaide, South Australia. There are a couple of particular places - including the University of Adelaide - that I think are incredibly important to being able to structurally reproduce different outcomes, different types of people, that give us the skills, the permission and the confidence to actually be able to take on and challenge the structural norms in which we live.
There’s a part of a book written by a University of Adelaide woman - someone that I’m sure everyone knows - Clementine Ford that I want to share. In her book ‘Fight Like A Girl’ she says of her days at the University of Adelaide,
“I was welcomed into this community alongside other newbies. The more our minds expanded to accommodate this startling, secret history of the world, the more strength we gleaned. We sat together in huddled circles on the university lawns, around pub tables, on the floor of the student newspaper office, and we talked excitedly about things that had, throughout all of our adolescent upbringings, seemed verboten. It felt powerful and liberating. It felt like we had spent our whole lives stumbling blindly through the dark. But someone had thrown a light on and we had gazed around the room in awe, blinking, realising suddenly that we were not alone.
Those women remain my friends today. They were my first comrades and my lasting saviours. Without them, I don’t know what I would have done.”
The thing that I have drawn on when I have had to do brave things to stand up to patriarchy and to understand who I am as a person is exactly that sense of comradeship that Clementine’s talking about and specifically those people - specifically Clementine.
In my career at the scariest point in time when I had to do the bravest thing I ever had to do I was watching what Clementine was doing and I was seeing how she was responding to the world and I thought if she could do that, then I can do this. I did the thing and people listened and they changed things. It sounds scary but knowing that you are in amongst a big group of people who are all working together in their own way is actually where the power comes from.
The challenge that I think we have now is how do we take the knowledge that we have and structurally embed it for the next generation? How do we make it so that it doesn’t matter whether you get to go to the University of Adelaide or not, that you get to learn how to fight like a girl?
Fighting like a girl is something that is handed down from generation to generation. It’s something we’ve been doing here in Adelaide for over 150 years and we will be doing for the next 150 (although I hope it doesn’t take that long to achieve equality). It’s embedded in our culture and our systems.
Our suffragettes proudly fought like girls in the 1800’s and as well as gaining the right to vote and stand for election they established the Advanced School for Girls and the University of Adelaide allowed women to study alongside men from day one, then becoming the first place in Australia and second in the world to admit women on an equal basis with men. We knew that the answers lay in structurally embedding equality in education. My public girls school has been renamed after Dame Roma Mitchell, the first women appointed as Queens Council and a judge who graduated from the University of Adelaide in the 1930’s. In the 1960’s the University of Adelaide became the spark for the women’s liberation movement, with Anne Summers proudly leading the charge that would establish our first domestic violence refuge and usher in a raft of reforms that to this day remain world-leading and creating an environment that produced Janine Haines, the first female leader of an Australian political party. The 1980’s created Julia Gillard, who not only became our first female Prime Minister and the author of the misogyny speech, but who led the charge on affirmative action within the Australian Labor Party. The 90’s gave us Penny Wong and Natasha Stott Despoja, Irene Watson and the early 00’s helped create Clementine Ford, Sarah Hanson Young, Jenni Caruso and female leaders so fierce that they aren’t even in Australia - they are all around the world, negotiating on behalf of women the world over. Our women leaders include our first female Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, one of two women in the Howard Cabinet Amanda Vanstone, our Governor Frances Adamson AC who was the first female Ambassador to China and Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the recently appointed first female CEO of Coles Leah Weckert - all proud alumni of the University of Adelaide.
When I discovered that Anne Summers had had the same problems of patriarchy that Gillard experienced in the 80’s and me in the 00’s at first my question was what happened to the men in Adelaide that created a patriarchy so powerful that women had to go to such extremes of inventing new waves of social movements just to be listened to? Then I realised it wasn’t that at all. Patriarchy is no worse in South Australia than anywhere else in the world. We’re a society that was established for the very purpose of equality - it’s the very reason our state was created. The problem is, we didn’t know in the 1830’s or the 1890’s or the 1960’s or even the early 00’s just how deep patriarchal systems and cultures run. With each new generation we strive a little bit further forward, learning and sharing together. In Adelaide, we’ve become so successful at creating female leaders that our work really does become world-leading. It’s not because of our patriarchy that we see women speaking up and out. It’s because we are getting something right. All of us - women and men.
I have no doubt that we’ll figure out the next plan, pulling together our collective minds and doing what Adelaide women have done for generations in the pursuit of equality. The next wave is coming, I’m sure of that. What we need to do now is find ways to not just talk to the women that we went to school and uni with. We need to figure out how to talk to people that sit outside our own friendship groups. People with life experiences different to our own.
We’ve had enough waves of change now to know exactly how they start - by sitting around with our friends and others, talking about the collective experiences we all have as women. Sharing our fears, our grief and our ideas about the better world that we want to create. We call it consciousness raising.
For each generation the issues of equality look and feel very different, because we are trying to get to work through a fresh layer of knowledge. We knew in the 60’s we needed more than a vote. We knew in the 80’s that we needed more than just having the right to run. In the early 00’s we needed someone to let us use their photocopier.
The issues of equality today are still being worked through and understood. My gut feeling is that the issues we need to address today are deeply cultural. Culture is something we can’t see and we can’t legislate away - but we can change it together. Creating an equal culture is a hard challenge, but we’re capable of it. We can’t simply look to getting women into Parliament or the law or corporate offices and think it’s enough - suffrage isn’t complete until there is equal treatment of the issues of men and women. Suffrage isn’t complete until we have true equality, not just equality on paper.
The answers will come in time and they will come from talking it through. If you’ve ever needed an excuse to catch up with old friends, go to the pub and talk about what is going on for you, this is it. It’s not just sitting around gossiping- it’s how all of us change the world. It’s real work.
Go get a copy of Clementine’s book too, if you have’t got one already.
What do we do next? The next wave of feminism is coming.
