The politics of feminist history

The Politics of Feminist History

Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 316 pp., $24.95, ISBN 1 86508 137 X.

Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia. 1788 to the Present, 4th ed. (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999), 318 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0 86840 737 2.

Anyone with temerity enough to sub-title a modest work of 300 pages the history of Australian feminism is either supremely foolhardy or unassailably confident she has produced a definitive work. Sadly, while there is much in Marilyn Lake's volume Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism that is of intrinsic interest, overall that confidence is misplaced: the book is short on narrative, extraordinarily incomplete in its account of many of the recent feminist accomplishments with which I am most familiar, inadequately indexed and so factually sloppy that researchers will be unable to rely upon it as a sole source.

Lake wants Getting Equal to> among other things, dispute what she contends are a number of myths about the story of feminism in this country. Principal among these is the view that there were two distinct eruptions of emancipatory politics in Australia with nothing much in between.

Lake argues that many political actions, such as the polling of candidates for elective office on their attitudes to women's issues, which the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) in 1972 thought it had imported from the United States, was in fact standard operating procedure for interwar Australian feminists. She provides a fascinating glimpse of the consternation with which the earlier generation of feminists reacted to the sexually permissive attitudes of 1970s women's liberationists. ELlinor Walker, an octogenarian Adelaide feminist, wrote to the Advertiser in 1974 in dismay that laws on prostitution, for which an earlier generation of women had fought, were in jeopardy of being...