Friday essay: public ‘pash ons’ and angry dads – personal politics started with consciousness-raising feminists. Now, everyone’s doing it

Personal activism has achieved major legislative change, such as no-fault divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion. But it’s also used by groups who want to reverse that change.

Thanks to “personal politics”, the everyday lives of Australians have been transformed in areas like no-fault divorce, providing safe abortions, decriminalising homosexuality, and introducing health and welfare programs tailored to women and LGBTIQ+ people.

Political change continues to be driven by personal stories.

Family Court violence

Men’s and fathers’ rights groups emerged in the lead-up to the 1975 Family Law Act and have continued to push back against feminist-led reforms to family life since.

Groups such as the Divorce Law Reform Association emerged in the late 1960s, sharing stories of distressed fathers who were required, by law, to support their divorced spouses and children.

After the Family Law Act passed, a rather angry masculinist activism argued for the “return of the fault factor”. The association’s president threateningly predicted “violence” if these male “victims” of oppression did not have their grievances recognised.

The Lone Fathers’ Association circulated stories of men who “considered kidnapping, even suicide” because of delays in the Family Court and a sense they were not being given a “fair go”.

Such groups argued the Family Law Act had turned divorced fathers into wage-slaves because they were required to provide child support, even if they had very limited custody.

No-fault divorce, the Divorce Law Reform Association argued, was making it “too easy” for women to leave marriages. At a Senate inquiry in 1980, it argued legal determinations of fault were required to “preserve the benefits, worth, stability and integrity of marriage” and prevent an ocean of male distress that was unfolding without it. A father was, and should remain, “the head of his own house”, the association argued.

In the early 1980s, the Family Court, its judges and their families became the target of lethal violence. Between 1980 and 1985, a series of bombings and shootings resulted in the death of one Family Court judge and another judge’s wife. They also resulted in the serious injury of Family Court judges. In 1984, the Family Court in Parramatta was bombed, though in this case no one was injured.

The “cause” of this violence, whether directed towards judges or families, was widely represented as a Family Court system that did not attend to men’s needs. As feminist scholar Therese Taylor observes, these activists had managed to turn “murder into the final proof of paternal love”.

From the mid-1990s, “men’s sheds” proliferated across Australia, and from 2010, they began to receive Commonwealth funding. There are now at least 1,250 of them (with access usually restricted to men). They promise to address isolation, poor mental health and suicide among (particularly older) men by providing “traditional” male activities and social contact.

In 2010, Men’s Sheds were awarded Commonwealth funding to support their expansion across Australia. In 2020, their funding was increased. A recent report commissioned by the Commonwealth government found most sheds reported being “well-funded and well-resourced”.

Source: Friday essay: public ‘pash ons’ and angry dads – personal politics started with consciousness-raising feminists. Now, everyone’s doing it

Critics are calling MONA ‘childish’, but history shows us how much the public love an art forger

The experts who criticise the fake Picassos and argue MONA’s reputation is damaged fail to recognise how the rebellious nature of art forgery so perfectly aligns with the museum’s reputation for shaking up the art industry.

Past exhibitions at MONA have created controversy and drawn protest from animal rights campaigners and enraged Christians.

One of the museum’s most popular works is a device that mimics the human digestive system and converts food into excrement, which is dispensed daily. The forged Picassos and the establishment’s snooty reaction actually encapsulates and emboldens the museum’s public image.

In time, the controversy will be seen as a positive story for MONA, and not the bonfire of integrity imagined by its critics.

The experts who warn of damage to Tasmania’s tourism industry have not stopped to appreciate the significance of a woman producing the fakes hung in the museum’s Ladies Lounge. Art forgery is exclusively a male activity.

Experts in this field such as Noah Charney and Thierry Lenain haven’t identified a single female art forger.

There may be hundreds of women producing art forgeries. They and their works are unknown because their paintings have not yet been revealed as fakes.

Until they are unmasked, Kirsha Kaechele can be recognised as the world’s most famous female art forger – an accolade that is certain to attract new visitors to the museum.

Source: Critics are calling MONA ‘childish’, but history shows us how much the public love an art forger

Josephine Butler: the forgotten feminist who fought the UK police – and their genital inspections | Women | The Guardian

In her memoir, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, Butler described her deliberations as filled with angst. She and her husband, a headteacher in Liverpool, knew it would harm his career. But neither was in doubt that the acts had to be fought. They gave the police the power to carry out compulsory genital examinations of women they believed to be prostitutes – but not their male customers. If the women refused to be checked, they were sentenced to jail with hard labour. If found to have a venereal disease, they were forcibly detained in a “lock hospital”.

In 1870, the LNA seized the chance of a byelection in Colchester. Sir Henry Storks was the Liberal candidate and a former governor of Malta, where he had introduced similar laws. He was also on record as arguing that the acts should be applied to soldiers’ wives – a suggestion which appalled Butler, who took it as proof that the acts were an insult to all women and potentially the start of something even more broadly threatening.

Convinced that MPs had deliberately avoided publicity when the laws were passed, Butler and her supporters organised prayer meetings and gave out thousands of leaflets. This provoked a furious response and repealers were repeatedly attacked. Butler was forced to hide from an angry crowd in a grocer’s cellar, and to leave a hotel in which she had booked under a false name in the middle of the night. But when the votes were counted, it was clear that the bold tactics had succeeded. Storks lost.

When the “first wave” of feminism is referred to, it is usually suffragettes that people have in mind. Less often remembered is that this was not the first time the British women’s movement rejected the reformers’ tactics of petitions, letters and lobbies in favour of a much more direct challenge.

At the root of her determination to overthrow the laws lay her conviction that they violated women’s civil rights. In speeches and writing, she cited the principle of habeas corpus – the prohibition of unlawful imprisonment – that she saw as fundamental to the British constitution. While advocates of women’s rights had long recognised the myriad ways in which women were disadvantaged, the repeal campaign was the first time that the forceful and legal operation of a sexual double standard was publicly challenged by women themselves. The coalition of police, military and courts that promoted the CD Acts, Butler told supporters, was “a diabolical triple power”; the forcible inspection of genitals was itself an assault.

Evidence heard by a Royal Commission pointed to the different way of doing things in Sweden. There, free advice and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases were offered in clinics to all who sought them. This, rather than unrealistic demands for total abstinence, was the model proposed by the reformers – and one far closer to a modern public health approach.

But such progressive notions were ignored, as was a recommendation that the age of protection (consent) be increased from 12 to 14. Instead, MPs chose to retain the status quo whereby men could legally have sex with children (which we would now call rape; the age was raised to 13 in 1875). It took more than a decade of campaigning by more than 100 local groups, and many years’ worth of evidence showing that the acts had failed to curb disease, before parliament backed a motion to suspend them in 1883. Butler was in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons, where women were allowed to watch from behind a screen, when the cheer went up.

Source: Josephine Butler: the forgotten feminist who fought the UK police – and their genital inspections | Women | The Guardian

Gender Identity: A Freudian Mistake?

A new biography of the founder of psychoanalysis reveals the unwitting role he played in the birth of ‘gender identity’. It’s a story of burglary, secret homosexual urges and a bizarre suicide.

It’s not just that Freud’s notion of ‘penis envy’ feels like an early outing for the lesbian penis, complete with its underlying misogyny. Nor that his insistence on infant sexuality has often been used to license the LGBTQ+ lobby’s refusal to treat child safeguarding seriously.

At the heart of the contradictory body of thought that Freud built up and adapted over the years was a conviction that people who felt unhappy might solve their problems if they were able to bring into the light their hidden and repressed feelings. It’s hardly a stretch to see those intellectual fingerprints imprinted all over the trans narrative of a hidden and repressed self bubbling up to the surface to have its day in the sun. High heels and wig at the ready.

Professor Robert Stoller used the core concepts of Freud to arrive at his theory of ‘gender identity’, a term he invented. His descriptions of everything to do with ‘gender identity’ from sissy culture to paedophilia are rooted in Freud. As are his most interesting works such as ‘Splitting’ about a woman who believed she had a penis. No surprise that ‘penis envy’ raises its ugly head here. So to speak.

Source: (22) Gender Identity: A Freudian Mistake?

2500 older Swiss women just landed a massive climate victory – Women’s Agenda

Older women face a greater risk of death from heatwaves in Australia and all over the world as a result of global inaction on climate change.

Now, a group of 2500 such women in Switzerland have brought the issue into sharp focus, by fighting and winning a landmark case in Europe that links climate inaction to human rights violation.

The group won their victory overnight in the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled Switzerland had violated the rights of the older Swiss women by failing to deliver a decent strategy for cutting emissions.

This win will have ramifications throughout Europe and the world, inspiring others to take action through the courts and pushing governments to consider their obligations to citizens further.

Anne Mahrer, Co-President of the Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection, said following the ruling that it comes after nine years of fighting for climate justice, with the support of Greenpeace.

“After the Swiss courts refused to hear us, the ECHR has now confirmed that climate protection is a human right,” she said.

Source: 2500 older Swiss women just landed a massive climate victory – Women’s Agenda

Mem’s a Boomer. Why her generation drove social change and isn’t just about house prices | SBS Insight

Younger generations often vocalise their resentment towards Baby Boomers and their inaction on climate policy, their hold on property and economic prosperity, but the work that Boomers have done to create positive changes in society is often overlooked.

By rejecting the conservative attitudes of their parents’ generation, Boomers transformed society by pushing back against social attitudes and norms and breaking taboos.

How Boomers fought against the stigma of single motherhood

When Tricia Harper returned to Australia from London in 1969 as a single mother with her baby daughter, she opened Melbourne’s The Age newspaper and read an article that stated the bottom groups on the social ladder, which included derelict men and unmarried mothers.
Harper had been living independently and working as a teacher when she decided to resist the intense societal pressure at the time to give her baby up for adoption. She kept her daughter Ruth despite family and friends voicing their disapproval.

This disapproval motivated Harper to group together with other unmarried mothers to form a group, The Council for Single Mothers and her Child, that would advocate for change.

“We wanted to abolish the illegitimacy … we wanted to change the Family Law Act, and get better child support payments. They were some of our key goals, as well as moving to eliminate stigma, get rid of labels,” Tricia said.

Source: Mem’s a Boomer. Why her generation drove social change and isn’t just about house prices | SBS Insight

Trailblazing Women Lawyers | National Library of Australia

This module is aligned to the Australian Curriculum (v9): History 7–10 and includes material to support the teaching of the Knowledge and Understand areas Building Modern Australia and The Globalising World.

Source: Trailblazing Women Lawyers | National Library of Australia

Abortions were illegal in Australia in the 1930s, and many women like Isabel Pepper died getting them – ABC News

Until the late 1960s, abortion was illegal in Australia. With limited access to contraception, many women, like my great-grandmother, unlawfully attempted to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

According to The Royal Women’s Hospital records from the 1930s, about 250 women each year presented with a septic abortion. This equates to five admissions each week to that one hospital.

“It’s a situation for the desperate,” registered nurse, midwife and historian, Madonna Grehan says.

According to the inquest, Isabel had repeatedly attempted to abort the pregnancy herself. When these home methods were unsuccessful, she sought the assistance of a backyard abortionist.

But there were clearly complications.

Once at the hospital, Isabel was quickly admitted to ward one, the septic ward.

“Ward one was a ward that collected women with lots of problems,” Ms Mabbitt explains.

Now in her 90s, the former midwife still has vivid memories of caring for women with septic abortions on ward one.

“It’s the distinctive smell, it’s all-encompassing. And the screaming. They were in so much pain from everything shutting down,” she says.

Despite the pain Isabel would undoubtedly have been suffering, she was interviewed by police within hours of her admission to hospital because of the illegality of abortion.

She told police that she had miscarried.

“She really didn’t give any indication of the truth, and that was normal,” Ms Mabbitt says.

Just 24 hours after she was admitted to hospital, Isabel died at 5.15am on August 21, 1937.

For decades, thousands of Australian women found themselves in equally desperate situations and they died as a result.

“What really irritates me, most of the people who are against abortion are men, and they really have no idea what they’re talking about, no idea how women died.”

Source: Abortions were illegal in Australia in the 1930s, and many women like Isabel Pepper died getting them – ABC News

Hidden women of history: Olympias, who took on an emperor, dodged a second marriage and fought for her faith

A formidable woman born in the second half of the fourth century and widowed at around 17, Olympias was not afraid to advocate for herself – or her friends.

A sad fact about the early Christian period is that very few texts written by women survive. Olympias was well educated and acquainted with bishops and even the emperor. We know she wrote letters to some of these men, but only the men’s letters to her remain.

There are stories about her life as well, and some about her monastery and her bodily remains after her death, but most of these were also written by men. Nevertheless, these sources can give us insight into the life of a formidable woman who opposed the emperor and fought for her way of life and her faith.

When she was widowed, according to an anonymous Life of Olympias, the emperor Theodosius tried to marry her off to a relative of his named Elpidius. Her extensive wealth – she owned property all over the empire including palaces in Constantinople – made her quite a catch.

But Olympias refused, apparently declaring

if the Lord Jesus Christ had wanted me to live with a man, he would not have taken away my first husband.

She told the emperor she wanted to live a celibate life as a monastic rather than marry again.

When Olympias refused to marry Elpidius, the emperor Theodosius commanded the prefect of the city, Clementius, be guardian of all her possessions until Olympias turned 30.

The Life gives Olympias a pithy reply in which she says she is glad to be relieved from the burden of her wealth and begs Clementius to distribute her wealth to the poor and the churches.

A few years later, Theodosius relented when he saw how dedicated Olympias was to the ascetic life, restoring her fortune. This enabled Olympias to establish a monastery or holy house for women in Constantinople.

Although she died in exile, Olympias was a significant figure who fought against the mould women were supposed to fit into, supporting a lot of people along the way.

Source: Hidden women of history: Olympias, who took on an emperor, dodged a second marriage and fought for her faith