Fifty years ago, I wrote a bestseller about sexism in Australia. So, what’s changed?

When the subversive and iconoclastic ideas of women’s liberation began infiltrating Australia in the late 1960s and early ’70s, women like me were thrilled. We eagerly absorbed these notions of rebellion. We were glad, grateful even, to have a counterweight to the dull mantras of femininity that, we were told, were the only path to respectability (i.e. a good husband) for women in Australia.

Coming out of the radicalism and sexual revolution of the ’60s, we’d left respectability way behind – although our mothers mostly had trouble grappling with that. We craved something more and women’s liberation seemed to be providing the answers. There was just one problem.

The books and pamphlets and magazines that we so passionately embraced from the United States and from the UK told stories about women in those countries and while we could identify with them in general, they did not deal with our own cultural and social experiences. We wanted to understand more about the specifics of Australian sexism (or, “male chauvinism” as we called it then).

Why was mateship seemingly the dominant ideology in our society? One that explicitly excluded women from so many areas of society and denied them agency in determining their own lives. Why were marriage and motherhood the only options dangled in front of us?

Growing up, most of we “women’s libbers”, as the press patronisingly referred to us, were taught there were two types of girls – “good” and “bad” – and that it was our obligation to avoid being “bad” so as not to ruin ourselves for marriage and motherhood.

Other Western societies imposed a similar Madonna/whore dichotomy on women, but somehow in Australia it seemed especially oppressive. Australian women had not only had to be “good” themselves, but they were responsible for enforcing – policing, if you like – their children’s and even their husband’s conduct. This was often known as “nagging”, an irritating trait yet one a great many women seemed to adopt with relish, because it carried a certain status: her undisputed right to be the moral guardian of her family.

In 1972, I gamely set out on the task of trying to understand the unique shape of Australia sexism through examining our history and current cultural mores, trying to establish where our particular forms of female oppression might have come from.

I spent most of the first year in the Mitchell Library manuscript room, and it was there that I cracked the code, as it were. I found military diaries from the First Fleet that described the female convicts as “damned whores”, and official documents that described the need to use women to alter the wild colonial society that characterised the early decades of the British invasion.

They wanted a country based on wives, not whores. I literally jumped for joy and made most un-library-like noises when I first came across Caroline Chisholm, the champion of female immigration. Chisholm’s 1847 pamphlet making the case for the mass importation of respectable women from Britain described how churches, schoolmasters and books could never do the job of “God’s police – wives and little children – good and virtuous women”.

Damned Whores and God’s Police was published on November 5, 1975, but all these decades later I still have women approach me and say the book changed their lives. (Less often these days am I approached by angry men telling me it ruined theirs!) These women saw the world, and their place in it, differently after reading my account of how these stereotypes had been used to keep Australian women confined to narrow and stifling roles. It gave them the courage to throw off these shackles and make their own life choices.

And how different Australia is today. We can choose our paths with far less penalty or censure. We can marry or not, have children when and if we want to and, most life-changing of all, we can enjoy the independence, pride and satisfaction that comes from having a job and an income. While no one would say we were perfect and that there are not still huge challenges to be confronted – the domestic violence emergency being the one that currently preoccupies me – we cannot ignore what has changed.

Almost 70 per cent of women are in employment, many more women than men now graduate from university, women comprise 50 per cent of federal parliament and are a majority of federal cabinet. We have a woman governor-general (our second), several women state governors and have had a woman chief justice of the High Court and prime minister. Currently, the economy is mostly run by women who are now in charge of the federal Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Productivity Commission. We could not even imagine such things back in 1975.

But men still have the power. We suffer from a gender pay gap, glass ceilings and glass cliffs. We can’t deny that misogyny is still with us and is perhaps worse than it ever was. There is definitely a backlash, with too many men seeing women’s success as undermining their status rather than as a plus for everyone.

I am often asked if the stereotypes are still with us and I think they are. Women have changed but not all of us and not enough. Some women still cling to a contemporary version of God’s Police – think Yummy Mummies and Trad Wives. Perhaps they see their domestic dominance as a vestige of power that, if surrendered, will leave them totally impotent. We still have conflicts between working and so-called non-working women, with mothers attacked for using childcare or failing to attend tuckshop duty. Women are still slut-shamed (think Nicole Kidman just recently) and blamed for their own sexual assaults.

On balance, we are far better off then we used to be, but it’s taken half a century. We probably need to pick up the pace.

Anne Summers is a writer and journalist who is currently Professor of Domestic and Family Violence at the Business School at UTS.