Feminism demands and enables a personal response to modern challenges

Most baby boomers spent the bulk of their lives in the second half of the twentieth century. Those decades saw many momentous events and developments, including the cold war and nuclear arms races, rapid decolonisation of the southern continents, a population explosion, environmental catastrophes and numerous wars.

Western societies experienced the introduction of television and computers, rise of youth politics, easy availability of cars, development of a generation gap, cures for many diseases, normalisation of high levels of debt, better contraception and decline of religious allegiance.

Australian values were influenced by debates over the American alliance, large scale immigration, the challenges of an ethnically diverse population, changes in manufacturing and primary industries, awareness of the dispossession of Indigenous people and the fragility of the natural environment, social mobility and the weakening of the two party political system.

These developments forced nation-states, social institutions and ultimately individuals to respond. In some cases, the responses proved radical. The period saw the rise of slogans such as multi-lateralism, economic restructuring, liberalisation, multi-culturalism and aspirational classes.

While powerful forces pushed society in directions certain to further advantage elites, individuals used a number of ideologies to assess new developments and imagine alternatives. To the established explanations of socialism and capitalism were added new left theories, the counter culture, environmentalism, civil rights and anti-militarism.

From about 1970, many women began to feel the need for a critique of their oppression that included their positions in these broader social movements. They felt the need for an explanation of their subjugation in supposedly liberating social movements.

The so-called second-wave of the women's movement, distinguished a need for a campaign for women's liberation not just within broader movements, but sometimes from the oppression they experienced within those movements.

This did not always involve separatism. Indeed other progressive social movements that encouraged a feminist critique were invigorated. Without feminist insights, the peace movements of the 1980s for example, struggled to escape the strange logic of the nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Male leaders benefited greatly when they were able to come down out of their heads into their hearts.

Ideologies such as feminism perform a variety of functions. They give followers methods for interpreting the world, provide a means of assessing the ethical value of policies and empower people to take personal actions. The better an ideology does these things, the better it will survive.

Both the women's movement and feminist thought have an immediate appeal to women by explaining the causes of oppression and making them determined to pursue their rights.

In order to survive as long as it has however, feminism needed to go beyond a binary distinction between male oppressors and female victims. The women's movement had to show men that patriarchal structures oppressed them as well, and encourages men to realise that they would be freer if they shunned the worst features of sexism and masculinism.

At a personal level, men and women came to understand the limitations placed on them by the social roles they were assigned. Men were traditionally warriors and breadwinners while women bore children and served men domestically. While this arrangement still suits many people, its limitations have become clear.

First, the strictly necessary male and female biological roles formed only a very small part of the wider traditional roles. Pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding occupied women for relatively short periods and did not explain the assignment of roles for a lifetime. Secondly, people should be able to choose the way they balanced their lives between the public and domestic spheres.

For me personally, decisions about that balance were taken within the context of a marriage partnership. Clearly, anyone who lived in a different arrangement, either by choice or necessity, faced a different set of decisions.

There is no doubt that I have been personally advantaged by our arrangements. Nor is there any doubt that without the influences of feminism, my partner and I would have found it difficult to make such decisions about our respective roles.

Without the acceptance of careers for women and acknowledgement of the principles – if not necessarily the practice - of equal opportunity and equal pay, my partner would have found the world of work less attractive. Without some wider acceptance that stereotypical sex roles were changing, I would hardly have been able to persevere with a life away from full-time employment.

As events have unfolded since 1976 when we swapped roles, my wife secured promotion and I took on interests outside of full time employment. As a result, I followed a fairly typical female role of part time work and domestic responsibilities.

The writings of feminists proved to be perfectly accurate in their assessments of the way society views people in the messy 'housewife' role and in the second-class world of 'casual' employment. Generally, I have been able to turn these often negative experiences to advantage, by writing analyses of these situations of prejudice and bias. Coming from a background in education, I was able to place my personal experience into a theoretical framework, but clearly, not all males attempting to fill alternative roles would relate to this academic side of feminism.

Males today know that time at home gives them the opportunity for private thinking. Solitude has the potential to strengthen people mentally. Males who have young children understand that a period of leave from employment facilitates closer contact.

This is reinforced for me when I see my sons with their children, but also when I see many other fathers of that generation with theirs. Today's fathers obviously enjoy their children a great deal and show every indication that this relationship is a major source of fulfilment for them.

If there has been a social revolution over the last fifty years, feminism has provided perhaps the single most important impetus. While there have been some casualties, all revolutions require sacrifices and cause upheavals, but better-balanced and more open workplaces and homes benefit everyone.

For feminism to work thoroughly, men have had to receive the message. Extra burdens should not be created for women by making them responsible for men's behaviour as well as their own. Most behaviour that is potentially harmful to women threatens humans generally, so the responsibility for changing them surely lies with all of us.

There are many forms of feminism. Feminism is not monolithic and it is perfectly legitimate that feminists display a wide range of views on social and political issues. One demonstration of feminism's power lies in the desperate reactions of those who fear its implications.

Last year when Australia got its first female prime minister, there was general acclaim that the final barrier to female participation in public life had been breached. While this is true in an essentialist sense, some feminist critics are aware that the real test of change is what a female leader does with power. If her behaviour is identical to that of male predecessors, then the change is strictly limited. There is a line of thought, which suggests that the men who wield power ensure that the only females promoted into leadership roles are ones they have vetted and who will not upset the status quo.

In the case of our first female prime minister, who seems no less jingoistic as male predecessors and shows no more compassion to asylum seekers or to people of the same sex wishing to marry, feminist historians might well conclude that her greatest contribution to changing attitudes lies in the fact that she openly and honestly brought a de facto relationship to the Lodge.

My researches into gender politics give some idea of how much remains to be done to advance feminism. While 'gender' and 'sex' are often confused, it is useful to define gender in terms of behaviour and sex as a characteristic of individuals. While the numerical presence of males and females in politics makes sex an interesting variable to investigate, it is behaviour that needs criticism in order to produce change.

Very often however, political practitioners and theorists alike have translated 'gender politics' as 'women in politics'. This misinterpretation has several implications. First, only women have gender. Men are then normal politicians and normal human beings. Secondly, only women use gender while men do not. Thirdly, women are the problem and it is they, not the system in need of change.

The backlash against feminism is remarkably similar to that against pacifism. Neither pacifism nor feminism has ever been allowed to have great influence and yet critics assure us that both ideologies have failed. States readily use the military as the first option in international disputes although the most predictable outcome is that the military will need to be deployed yet again before long. Feminism has had very limited impact on the masculinism of the military, which demonstrates continually that it operates on misogynist principles.

It is not only the militarists who resist change. Monarchs, mullahs and moguls cling to traditional sources of power. It was the British crown ultimately that dispossessed Aboriginal peoples and destroyed their cultures. The fundamentalist clerics of Islam and Christianity deny the equality of the sexes. Business corporations have been slow to admit women as CEOs and board directors.

A nascent men's movement has found it difficult to become established while the agents of backlash tell men that feminism and not masculinism, is the source of their problems. While many feminists might justifiably feel exhausted, there remains a great need for the critical insights provided by feminist thought.