Book Review

Book Editors' Note:
We invited two reviews of Marilyn Lake's book, one from a veteran of the feminist movement, the other from a young feminist just embarking on her academic career. Marilyn Lake declined an invitation to reply to this discussion of her work.

This very belated review (and I apologise for the delay in writing it) has given me a rare chance to use the perspective of time to evaluate the book. It is a sad comment that a slip of just over two years has so changed the political landscape that one's view of a history might be altered in such a fundamental way. At a time when equality is itself under question, books about feminist achievements seem to reflect a more optimistic past.	1
The subtitle of the book is 'The history of Australian feminism' and that, in itself, is always a risky claim. There has been much debate over the past decade on whether a singular feminism ever was an appropriate term, given the diversity of women. The claims therefore of any book to be covering not only one feminism but also to being 'THE' history, rather than 'A' history sets up the reader to question how effectively the accounts match the spread of both events and interpretations.	2
Getting Equal makes the sustainable assumption that women are not always better off than they were in the early days of colonisation despite a long and hard fought struggle to improve our condition. Certainly, the history of early active women's groups fighting for policies and electoral reforms has too often been overlooked and the book provides an interesting, if selective account of various efforts made by a wide range of women. It has to be selective because the histories of the various states are quite dense in themselves, and differ quite dramatically. A single account cannot hope to cover them all. The problem is that the book does not confess its limits form the outset. It should clearly signal that there were other women, other stories which could have been used. In the end, the reader is left wondering why some campaigns and issues are there and others are not.	3
I am not a historian but I found many accounts of what had been unknown battles and people intensely interesting. However, as a participant in the struggles of the last 30 years, I am also very conscious of omission and selectivity. And as a continuing activist who is distressed by the possible losses of some of the gains of the last three decades, I would have liked to have seen a more critical debate about the limits of reform, both real and imagined.	4
To be fair, Lake does note the problem of assuming that changes in the roles of women have enabled us to compete more fairly with men. This is by no means a clear victory: male terms still set the boundaries. Male modes of working (as she reminds us) are not appropriately combined with domestic responsibilities. She is also rightly critical of the ways in which the needs of indigenous women, and other less advantaged groups of women were often not appropriately addressed and of the very rapid progress of some women into high paid jobs.	5
However, there is a range of other critiques that are missing. There needs to be a recognition that the sorts of reform we sought were really exhausted by the eighties and little which was new was achieved in even the last years of that decade. The reason for the stalling of many of the demands was the changing external political environment by which there was a reduction in the power of the public sphere and a loss of interest in collective forms of change. The shift (caused in part by neo-liberalism and echoed by certain aspects of post modern debates) meant that many of the strategies of seventies feminism were no longer very effective. In looking at the DIY feminisms, Lake does not see these as symptomatic of wider external pressures to which younger women were responding.	6
Maybe it's a little unfair to make this criticism some time after the book was obviously written. That is the context of time to which I was referring to above. In the year 2002, it is obvious that there is little interest in the forms of feminism we used to such great political effect in the seventies and eighties. In the recent Federal election, neither major political party made any real effort to court the women's vote by any feminist policy making. The extent to which any women's issues were addressed was in promoting 'choice', a neo-liberal keyword, with the assumption that many such 'choices' would be for traditional roles.	7
The child care program, my particular baby, has lost almost all its equity potential, and become unaffordable for many. In education, the focus of concern has shifted: the 'problems' of boys dominate the agenda; the collapse of centralised wage fixing has increased the gaps between male and female average earnings; the family friendly options in awards have been eroded or altogether lost; the list of setbacks goes on and on. These changes are not new and have been a long time coming. Recent issues signal further losses, such as changes to the Sex Discrimination Act to ban IVF for single women and dykes and the failure to sign the optional protocol of the UN Convention to Eliminate Discrimination against Women.	8
There are many bones I could pick with Marilyn Lake's selections and analysis. Like many 'left' feminists, she confuses reform with liberalism and class. She ignores, for instance, the ways in which Women's Liberation groups become directly compromised and tangled with the state by accepting funding for women's services. I would argue that these relationships essentially reformist: they required many political accommodations and involved the collectives in all the contradictions of voluntary work and government funding. This somewhat one-eyed view of the debates of the seventies missed an important opportunity. The younger women I teach need a somewhat broader view of the complexities of differing political stances and the cross overs of the various groupings.	9
However, we all each write different versions of what we remember and these accounts are bound to change with the passage of time. For all my differences with Lake, I think this book has great value in reminding us of what went before us. I certainly learned about many political activities undertaken by women before I became an activist in the seventies.	10
In conclusion, this is a highly readable and extremely useful book. It does have its limitations (as do all such ambitious projects) but it remains a worthy contribution to the project of feminist scholarship.	11
University of Technology, Sydney EVA COX

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