Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution: 1969–1979

By Isobelle Barrett Meyering

When Australian women’s liberationists challenged prevailing expectations of female domesticity, they were accused of being anti-mother and anti-child. Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution provides a much-needed reassessment of this stereotype. Drawing on extensive archival research and personal accounts, it places feminists at the forefront of a new wave of children’s rights activism that went beyond calls for basic protections for children, instead demanding their liberation. Historian Isobelle Barrett Meyering revisits this revolutionary approach and charts the debates it sparked within the women’s movement. Her examination of feminists’ ground-breaking campaigns on major social issues of the 1970s-from childcare to sex education to family violence-also reveals women’s concerted efforts to apply this ideal in their personal lives and to support children’s own activism.

Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution sheds light on the movement’s expansive vision for social change and its lasting impact on the way we view the rights of women and children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522877847

Book preview

Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution

1969–1979

Isobelle Barrett Meyering

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2022

Text © Isobelle Barrett Meyering, 2022

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

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Text design by J & M Typesetting

Cover design by John Canty

Cover image: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation

Typeset by J & M Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522877830 (paperback)

9780522877847 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction: Childhood is Hell

Chapter 1: Why Children’s Liberation?

Chapter 2: Free Mum, Free Dad, Free Me, Free Child Care

Chapter 3: Educate to Liberate

Chapter 4: What Every Girl Should Know

Chapter 5: Exposing Abuse

Afterword: Care for Kids?

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has been many years in the making. It began as my doctoral thesis at UNSW, where I was incredibly fortunate to be supervised by Zora Simic. I could not have asked for a more dedicated supervisor and advocate. Zora’s commitment to this project was unwavering and her intellectual generosity remains a model to me. My thanks also go to Anne O’Brien, my co-supervisor, who provided invaluable advice and encouragement as the project evolved.

Macquarie University has proven to be an ideal place to complete this work. Michelle Arrow has been an important and supportive mentor and provided wise counsel and feedback as this book took final shape. The influence of her scholarship on my own thinking is apparent throughout. I also thank all my colleagues in Modern History for the interest they have shown in my research and members of the faculty-wide Children’s Rights, Participation and Perspectives research stream for helping me view this project in a wider context. The Faculty of Arts Research Office has been ready to assist whenever needed and provided a publication subsidy to support essential costs associated with this book.

I am also deeply appreciative of the support I have received beyond these institutions. Numerous individuals have played a role in shaping this project, but I especially thank Joy Damousi for backing this work in her capacity as MUP’s History Series editor, Shurlee Swain for her ongoing interest since agreeing to examine my doctoral thesis and Ann Curthoys for her generous endorsement of the final publication. Over the years, the Sydney Feminist History Group has provided a welcoming space to share ideas and connect with other scholars, while fellow members of Oral History NSW and the History Council of NSW have offered refreshing perspectives on bringing history to a wider audience. Camille Nurka was an enthusiastic reader and careful editor of my work when I was first preparing this manuscript for MUP. I am also grateful to the Australian Academy of the Humanities for awarding funding to this work under its Publication Subsidy Scheme in 2020.

The ideas presented in this book have previously been presented in a range of scholarly forums. I first explored the concept of children’s liberation in an article, ‘Liberating Children: The Australian Women’s Liberation Movement and Children’s Rights in the 1970s’, published in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal in 2013. This book is also informed by work I have published separately as articles for Australian Historical Studies and Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, and as book chapters in Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity (2016) and A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity (2018). I thank the editors of these publications for their feedback and guidance, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers for their insights.

I also acknowledge those who have assisted with the practical side of this research. The feminist archive is a sprawling one, and undertaking the research for this book involved navigating multiple collections across the country. My thanks go to the staff and volunteers who helped me in this process at the Australian Queer Archives, Fryer Library (University of Queensland), Murdoch University Library, National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Pride History Group and University of Melbourne Archives. This book also draws on a selection of interviews that I undertook in the early stages of my doctoral studies. In addition to the individuals cited in the text, I am grateful to all those who participated in this component of my research; our conversations enriched my understanding of this period in all kinds of ways.

It goes without saying that I owe a huge thanks to the team at MUP, especially Nathan Hollier for seeing the value of this project in the first place and Catherine McInnis for guiding me through each stage of the publishing process, with unerring patience and understanding. Caitlin McGregor brought a sharp eye and political nous to the copyediting process. I also thank the two peer reviewers for their encouraging comments and astute suggestions for improvement.

The process of research and writing can at times be all-consuming. My friends have kept me grounded over the years. Special thanks go to those of you who have shared parts of the journey through academia, in particular Chelsea Barnett, Kristie Flannery, Emma Gleadhill, Matthew Haultain-Gall, James Keating, Anna Lebovic, Stephanie Mawson, Briony Neilson, Jess Parr, Keith Rathbone, Sophie Robinson, Francesco Stolfi and Inara Walden. To all my other friends—you know who you are; thanks for providing welcome distraction when needed and tolerating periods of neglect when deadlines loomed.

My family have gone above and beyond in supporting this endeavour. Writing a book while adjusting to parenthood, let alone during a pandemic, proved more challenging than I ever expected. Thank you to my parents, Gudrun Meyering and Chris Barrett, and to Alexander Barrett Meyering, Elena Fombertaux and Anne Janda for helping us all get through this time. To Michael Janda: thank you for your confidence in me, for the countless hours you have put in to help see this project to completion and, above all, for reminding me what matters.

Josephine Janda-Meyering arrived in this world appropriately on International Women’s Day in 2020. This book is for you, Josie—I look forward to finding out what you make of it.

Introduction

Childhood is Hell

‘Childhood is hell’, pronounced North American radical feminist Shulamith Firestone in 1970.¹ A ‘cult of childhood’ had taken hold of modern society, concealing the harsh realities of ‘what childhood is really like’, she argued.² Adults were inclined towards a fantasied view of childhood happiness when, in practice, children were ‘repressed at every waking minute’.³ Firestone was the author of the bestseller The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) and the argument that children represented a uniquely oppressed class was one of its central propositions. In a chapter titled ‘Down with Childhood’, Firestone set out to show that children’s physical dependence on adults had been compounded by a wide range of social practices, from their legal designation as minors to the development of a special industry of child-care experts. The cumulative effect was to disenfranchise children, on the one hand, and reinforce women’s maternal role, on the other. The oppression of women and children was ‘intertwined and mutually reinforcing’. It therefore followed that children’s liberation was a prerequisite of women’s liberation.⁴

A year after the book’s release, Australian feminist Biff Ward (then Macdougall) reviewed The Dialectic of Sex for the Sydney women’s liberation newspaper Mejane. She proclaimed Firestone ‘the most important Women’s Liberation theorist to date’. Ward was impressed by many aspects of the book, but reserved her highest praise for Firestone’s ‘attack on the institution of childhood’. She found in Firestone’s work a ‘passionate plea for the abolition of childhood and adolescence, and for a new awareness of young human beings as people’.⁵ Others would likewise find themselves captivated by Firestone’s analysis of children’s liberation and were spurred to take on a wide variety of projects in its name. Indeed, at the end of the decade, The Dialectic of Sex was still being appealed to as an authoritative statement on the subject by activists engaged in campaigns around issues ranging from child care to child abuse. Yet, although The Dialectic of Sex has been consistently cited as one of the most influential texts for Australian women’s liberation, Firestone’s vision of feminism as a joint project of women’s liberation and children’s liberation—and the diverse forms of political action it helped to inspire—rarely rates a mention in histories of the movement.⁶

When I first read The Dialectic of Sex, I was in my mid-twenties and had recently commenced my doctoral research on the history of Australian women’s liberation. Involved in women’s activism since my undergraduate years, I thought I had a relatively good handle on feminist theory. But Firestone’s calls for children’s liberation took me by surprise. The Dialectic of Sex is better known for its forthright critique of maternity as the primary source of female oppression. Firestone famously described pregnancy as ‘barbaric’ and advocated artificial reproduction in its place.⁷ I did not expect to find such a sympathetic account of childhood oppression in this supposed exemplar of ‘feminist antinatalism’.⁸

Prompted by the discovery, I sought out references to the concept of children’s liberation in other sources. As I trawled through the collection of archival material I had already started to amass, it quickly became apparent that Firestone’s views were far from exceptional. While The Dialectic of Sex made the case for children’s liberation most explicitly, the concept reverberated through a wide range of other feminist texts of the period and was put into practice in diverse ways. Evidence of the children’s liberation ethos abounded once I started looking: from communal child-care experiments that claimed to free children from the oppression of the nuclear family and non-sexist children’s books that provided models of children rebelling against adult authority, to sex education resources that promoted more open discussion of sexual pleasure and children’s programs implemented in domestic violence refuges to ensure child residents’ distinctive needs were addressed.

Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution: 1969–1979 is the product of these investigations. The book draws on archival research and personal accounts to uncover the radical vision of children’s rights pursued by Australian women’s liberationists during the 1970s. Not satisfied by promises of basic protections, feminists demanded children’s liberation from adult power in all its forms. Their vision was a revolutionary one: to create a new society in which relations between adults and children, as well as women and men, would be fundamentally refigured. The resulting political agenda would prove especially attractive to feminist mothers, but also attracted a diverse range of other women, including teachers, cultural activists and feminist service workers. Together they worked to transform the institutions they most closely associated with the misuse of adult power—the childhood industry, schools, the welfare system and, above all, the nuclear family—and to initiate a broader shift in social attitudes towards children. It was a bold vision, underpinned by a belief that women’s demands for autonomy and self-determination must be extended to children too.

These ideas did not emerge in isolation. The feminist agenda of children’s liberation was conceived in the context of a larger global youth rebellion against adult authority. The late 1960s and the 1970s are widely recalled as years of generational conflict, as those born during the affluent post-war years questioned the apparent complacency of their parents. Their disillusionment fuelled not only a vocal student and anti-war movement, including demands for the lowering of the voting age, but a wider cultural rebellion.⁹ These generational conflicts prompted a wide range of radicals to reassess the rights of children, as reflected in the writings of anti-psychiatry theorists, radical educationists, countercultural activists and sexual libertarians. These radicals shared with women’s liberationists a deep antipathy towards established forms of authority and sought to expose the role of childhood socialisation in the maintenance of the status quo. Moreover, they emphasised—and celebrated—the supposedly untapped potential of the child: once liberated from adult power, children would finally be able to articulate their interests and make their own decisions, they argued.¹⁰ In this respect, the concept of children’s liberation differed from previous approaches to children’s rights that assumed that children needed adults to act on their behalf.

For women’s liberationists, the concept of children’s liberation also served to distinguish their politics from those of previous generations of feminist and women’s rights activists. Their predecessors had made children’s welfare a major focus, launching campaigns around issues ranging from infant health and child endowment to the age of consent and juvenile offending. However, these campaigns were largely embedded in a maternalist framework, positioning women as playing a key role in the ‘protection’ of children.¹¹ By contrast, women’s liberationists insisted that an emphasis on children’s need for ‘protection’ only contributed further to children’s oppression by reinforcing their dependent status. The demand for children’s liberation reflected the movement’s more confrontational style of sexual politics, which saw them reject middle-class domesticity and the nuclear family in particular as instruments of capitalist oppression.¹²

Women’s liberationists were not alone in advocating children’s liberation during this period, but they were among its most enthusiastic and vocal proponents, for they saw its potential to transform the lives of both women and children. Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution seeks to highlight the movement’s distinctive contribution to this new mode of children’s rights activism. To do so, it explores a wide variety of feminist initiatives that either expressly articulated the goal of children’s liberation as a central platform or implicitly supported this position by calling attention to the conditions of disempowerment specific to the situation of the child. Brought together here, these initiatives not only help to locate women’s liberation in a wider radical milieu, but also underline the movement’s utopian outlook. If nothing else, women’s liberation activists’ pursuit of children’s liberation—which, for Firestone, was nothing less than the ‘elimination’ of childhood—speaks powerfully to their desire to ‘remake their world’.¹³ This utopianism was especially evident in activists’ efforts to enact children’s liberation in their own lives. As historian Marilyn Lake and others have noted, a belief that change ‘had to begin with oneself’ was central to the movement’s revolutionary outlook.¹⁴ Tracing activists’ manifold attempts to put the philosophy of children’s liberation into practice in turn offers new insights into this crucial dimension of feminist politics and the challenges it presented for activists on the ground.

This history also serves as a timely reminder of the politically contested nature of childhood and the need for continued critical engagement with contemporary children’s rights frameworks. Decades after feminists issued their calls for children’s liberation, the debates charted in this book remain pertinent ones, not least of all given our continued investment in notions of childhood innocence, vulnerability and incapacity—ideas that remain pervasive in contemporary discourse, from discussions of children’s mental health to the treatment of asylum seekers and Indigenous children. As Australian philosopher Joanne Faulkner warns, one of the perverse effects of constructing childhood in these terms is to diminish the importance of children in other ways: if ‘children come to be valued only by virtue of their innocence, we risk losing the capacity to value them in other respects’.¹⁵

Other recent critical childhood scholarship has similarly highlighted the paradoxical effects of the cultural emphasis on childhood innocence and, in particular, its implications for debates around gender and sexuality. Much of this work focuses on instances of ‘moral panic’ over children’s sexuality and the ways in which discourses of ‘protection’ perform a regulatory function, delimiting the types of sexual knowledge and experience allowed to children—while also making it more difficult to have meaningful discussions about consent and sexual ethics.¹⁶ Others note the uneven ways in which the discourse of innocence is applied. The historic Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017) has, for example, brought welcome public attention to the issue of sexual violence, but also exposed longstanding cultural assumptions about the ‘worthiness’ of different categories of victims. Arguably one unintended effect has been to marginalise stories of other forms of mistreatment.¹⁷

The concept of childhood innocence also manifests in contemporary discourse in surprising ways. Recent mobilisations by children and young people around issues ranging from LGBTQIA+ rights to climate change have been widely greeted by progressive activists as evidence of their capacity to contribute productively to national political debate. Yet even the responses of sympathetic adults, reassured by the ‘hopefulness’ and ‘optimism’ of younger generations, are at times revealing of a tendency to patronise and sentimentalise childhood, while backlash from conservative politicians demonstrates a dogged unwillingness to recognise children’s actions as legitimate interventions into the political realm. Children are either deemed to be the victims of adult manipulation or simply told to keep out of politics.¹⁸

Against the backdrop of these contemporary contests, this book invites critical consideration of the ways in which we frame discussions of children’s rights and agency. This history warrants particular attention given the ways in which feminism is itself often positioned in debates about childhood and children’s rights. As feminist scholar Barbara Baird notes, ‘the child’ has often been ‘used’ against feminism: feminists are, on the one hand, accused of inciting women to abandon their children as they seek out roles in the public sphere and, on the other, disparaged when they speak about children and related subjects, such as childbirth, child care and child abuse.¹⁹ As we will see, the former view—that of the ‘anti-child’ feminist—is one closely bound up with the history of women’s liberation. One of the key contributions of this book is to challenge this caricature and, in doing so, to promote more informed engagement with feminism’s past.

Women’s Liberation in Australia, ‘Feminist Amnesia’ and the ‘Anti-Child’ Feminist Stereotype

The late 1960s and the 1970s represent a defining moment in the history of Australian feminism. This period saw the emergence of the ‘new feminism’, or what has since become more widely known as the ‘second wave’—an upsurge in feminist activism that, as historian Michelle Arrow has recently reiterated, ‘destabilised a foundational concept of modern political culture: the notion that there were two separate spheres of life, public and private’.²⁰ Women’s liberation positioned itself as the revolutionary arm of the new feminism. It formed part of the wider eruption of protest movements emerging out of the new left, involving student radicals, anti-war activists, trade unionists, Indigenous rights activists, sexual libertarians and gay liberationists.²¹ Together, these movements generated an optimistic political climate: for women’s liberationists and other radicals, ‘these were inspired and searching times when it was possible to rethink old, familiar assumptions’.²²

The first women’s liberation groups in Australia formed simultaneously in Sydney and Adelaide during the summer of 1969–1970, inspired in large part by events in the United States and Britain.²³ Women’s liberation soon spread to Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Hobart, as well as several regional cities, though it was not until May 1972 that the first public meeting of women’s liberation took place in Perth.²⁴ Over the course of the decade, women’s liberation grew and took a range of forms. Members formed action groups to campaign around issues ranging from reproductive rights to workplace discrimination and set up local consciousness-raising groups in which they reflected on the effects of sexism on their own lives. Within a few years, they had begun creating their own alternative institutions, such as women’s centres, feminist health services, rape crisis centres and women’s refuges, in an effort to provide safe spaces for women in the wider community. Taking advantage of their strong presence on university campuses, some activists initiated women’s studies courses in universities and local colleges. Others became involved in what has since been described as a ‘cultural renaissance’ in women’s art, literature, film, music and theatre.²⁵

Most early members of the women’s liberation movement were drawn from the new left, though the relationship was not a straightforward one. Women’s liberation was formed, in part, as a reaction against ‘male chauvinism’ within the new left and insisted that it was an autonomous movement. At the same time, the early links between the new left and women’s liberation shaped its distinctive style of feminist politics, including its rejection of ‘reformism’, its commitment to collective action and its resistance to formal structures.²⁶ These principles distinguished women’s liberation from other variants of second-wave feminism that emphasised the need to work within existing political structures—most notably, the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), which formed in April 1972 and became a formidable player in the federal election later that year after its survey of candidates, designed to test their views on a wide range of women’s issues, gained widespread media coverage.²⁷ Some members of women’s liberation went on to join WEL, while others moved in and out of the so-called ‘femocracy’—the feminist bureaucracy—inaugurated under the Whitlam Labor government and considered to be a uniquely Australian style of feminism. Even so, how one positioned oneself in the feminist landscape still mattered. Many activists consciously insisted on the label ‘women’s liberationist’, initially eschewing the term ‘feminism’ itself as overly ‘bourgeois’ and ‘respectable’.²⁸

The movement’s distinctive politics have since been reiterated by some of its most prominent members, concerned that its legacy might be overlooked. Indeed, more so than many social movements, women’s liberation has been active in constructing its own history. By the late 1970s, Australian activists were already issuing their own accounts of the movement and groups had begun to set up dedicated women’s liberation archives.²⁹ Since then, both prominent and less well-known activists have produced memoirs, anthologies and organisational histories.³⁰ Furthermore, many of the early scholarly accounts of women’s liberation and the second wave more generally were written by those who were participants or at least sympathetic observers.

Yet despite these efforts to preserve the historical memory of women’s liberation, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, several prominent Australian scholars issued warnings that the movement’s history was at risk of being forgotten. Philosopher Jean Curthoys described a process of ‘feminist amnesia’ that, she argued, had resulted in the ‘suppression’ of the ‘liberationist’ politics of the 1970s.³¹ Meanwhile, historian Susan Magarey argued that women’s liberation’s history had been ‘obscured’ as a result of the ‘ascendance’ of liberal feminism and, with it, the subordination of the ‘socialist and anarchist dimension in feminist politics’.³² She has recently reiterated this concern and made a renewed appeal to remember ‘the exuberance, the joy for women in breaking the rules, behaving badly, in public—a feature of Women’s Liberation that seems to have been entirely obliterated from memory and history’.³³

These concerns are not without some basis. Although women’s liberation was hardly ignored in early Australian accounts of the second wave, it also competed with histories of WEL and the femocrat experiment. Both of these featured prominently in the large body of scholarship on feminism and the state produced in the 1980s and 1990s, while WEL has been the focus of several dedicated histories.³⁴ Generational debates within feminism have also fuelled anxiety about the ‘forgetting’ of women’s liberation. Concerns that younger women have little appreciation of the struggles and achievements of women’s liberation—or of the second wave more broadly—have been expressed since at least the mid-1990s.³⁵ But if former activists once worried that their efforts had gone unappreciated, the recent proliferation of research on Australian women’s liberation should provide some reassurance that this is far from the case.³⁶ This development mirrors trends overseas, particularly in the United States, where a plethora of new studies have sought to place women’s liberation at the centre of historical inquiry.³⁷

This book contributes to this growing body of work by highlighting the importance of children’s liberation to activists’ revolutionary vision. Most accounts of the Australian women’s movement do not mention children’s liberation as a specific dimension of feminist activism in the 1970s and it is only hinted at in the wider historiography of the era’s radical politics.³⁸ When children are discussed, they typically appear as the subject of