Abstract
In the early 1970s, second-wave feminist theories of sex-role socialisation provided a new way of understanding the experience of Australian girlhood. While part of a transnational feminist discourse, this chapter argues that critiques of girls’ socialisation gained traction through activists’ often painstaking efforts to trace its origins and generate evidence of its effects at a local level. Three key themes are explored: feminists’ efforts to link girls’ socialisation to a distinctive form of Australian sexism; the use of personal testimony to develop more individualised accounts of socialisation; and the emphasis in early research studies on the gap between sex-role ideology and social realities. This process in turn brought greater specificity to claims about girls’ socialisation while also revealing the limitations of this model.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Lynn Fleming, ‘One View of Women’s Liberation’, Shrew, 1, no. 1 (January 1971), 7.
- 2.
Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999), 233.
- 3.
A particularly iconic example is that of the American record, book, and television series Free to Be …You Me. On its history, see Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett (eds), When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
- 4.
By way of example, see the section comparing initiatives in Australia and Canada in the 1970s and 1980s in Jane Gaskell and Sandra Taylor, ‘The Women’s Movement in Canadian and Australian Education: From Liberation and Sexism to Boys and Social Justice’, Gender and Education, 15, no. 2 (2003), 154–60.
- 5.
Carol Dyhouse, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (London: Zed Books, 2013), 197. The popular impact of feminist critiques of girls’ socialization is similarly attested to in Australian sociologist Chilla Bulbeck’s study of the generational impacts of feminism, which opens with chapters entitled ‘Growing Up as Girls’ and ‘Training for Life’. See Chilla Bulbeck, Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women (Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 1–2.
- 6.
On consciousness raising as part of Australian feminist practice, see Kristin Henry and Marlene Derlet, Talking Up a Storm: Nine Women and Consciousness-Raising (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1993).
- 7.
The inquiry, undertaken under the auspices of the Schools Commission, is discussed later in this chapter, in the section entitled ‘Researching Girlhood’. For general background on the inquiry and its impact, see the detailed discussions in Alison Mackinnon, ‘Girls, School and Society’, Australian Feminist Studies, 21, no. 50 (2006), 276–279; and Lyn Yates, The Education of Girls: Policy, Research and the Question of Gender (Hawthorn, Vic.: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1993), 7–14.
- 8.
An early example of this critique can be found in Barrie Thorne, ‘Re-Visioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?’, Gender & Society, 1, no. 1 (1987), 91–95. See also Raewyn W. Connell and Rebecca Pearse, Gender: In World Perspective, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 89–90.
- 9.
This critique formed part of a wider challenge to the ‘concepts and categories of white feminism’. See Jan Pettman, Living in the Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia (North Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 153.
- 10.
For a brief overview of these different strands of Australian feminism, see Bulbeck, Living Feminism, 21–24.
- 11.
See especially Kera Lovell, ‘Girls Are Equal Too: Education, Body Politics, and the Making of Teenage Feminism’, Gender Issues, 33, no. 71 (2016), 71–95; and Lori Rotskoff, ‘Little Women’s Libbers’ and ‘Free to Be Kids’: Children and the Struggle for Gender Equality in the United States’, in Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett (eds), When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 92–110.
- 12.
Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (North Sydney, NSW: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984), 10.
- 13.
For a discussion of the early development of sex-role theory, including the influential work of American sociologist Talcott Parson, see R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 29–32.
- 14.
Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought, 7–8.
- 15.
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1979; repr. London: Virago, 1977), 54. First published in 1970. Citations refer to the Virago edition.
- 16.
Ibid., 26.
- 17.
Ibid., 35.
- 18.
Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (London: Temple Smith, 1972; South Melbourne, Vic.: Sun Books, 1972), 174. Citations refer to the Sun Books edition.
- 19.
Joyce Thorpe Nicholson and Daniel Wrixon Thorpe, A Life of Books: The Story of D.W. Thorpe Pty Ltd., 1921–1987 (Middle Park, Vic.: Courtyard Press, 2000), 218.
- 20.
Joyce Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls (Carlton, Vic.: Pitman Publishing, 1975), 3.
- 21.
Nicholson and Thorpe, A Life of Books, 136; Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: MacGibbon and McKee, 1970).
- 22.
Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls, 11.
- 23.
Zora Simic, ‘Women’s Writing’ and ‘Feminism’: A History of Intimacy and Estrangement’, Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, no. 28 (2013), http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/zora-simic.
- 24.
‘It’s a Success …’, Womanspeak, 2, no. 2 (February–March 1976), 24–25.
- 25.
Joyce Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls (Carlton, Vic.: Pitman Publishing, 1975; London: Virgao, 1977, 2nd ed. 1980).
- 26.
For a discussion of the importance of these texts in the wider context of the development of women’s history in Australia, see Ann Curthoys, ‘Visions, Nightmares, Dreams: Women’s History, 1975’, Australian Historical Studies, 27, no. 106 (1996), 4–5, 9–10.
- 27.
Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books Australia, 1976), 12.
- 28.
Ibid., 21.
- 29.
Ibid., 11.
- 30.
Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1975), 247–248.
- 31.
Ibid., 152.
- 32.
Ibid., 154.
- 33.
Ibid., 153.
- 34.
R. W. Connell, ‘You Can’t Tell Them Apart Nowadays, Can You?’, Search, 5, no. 7 (1973), 282–285, quoted in Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 429. The wider study was published as W. F. Connell, R. E. Stroobant, K. E. Sinclair, R. W. Connell and K. W. Rogers, 12 to 20: Studies of City Youth (Sydney: Hicks Smith & Sons, 1975).
- 35.
The women’s liberation movement in Sydney launched a campaign for the closure of state girls’ homes in August 1972, with some success: Two of the most infamous homes, the Parramatta Girls’ Training School and Hay Institution for Girls, were shut in 1974. The campaign has been briefly documented in Suzanne Bellamy, ‘Guthrie, Bessie Jean Thompson (1905–1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1996), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/guthrie-bessie-jean-thompson-10382/text18393; and in Bonney Djuric, Abandon All Hope: A History of Parramatta Girls Industrial School (Perth: Chargan My Book Publisher, 2011), chap. 8.
- 36.
Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 161–162.
- 37.
Nicholson, What Society Does to Girls, 3.
- 38.
‘A Guide to Consciousness-Raising’, Ms., July 1972, 22. The guide appears in a collection of materials of the Women’s Liberation Centre, Sydney, Box 8, First Ten Years of Sydney Women’s Liberation Collection, MLMSS 9782, State Library of New South Wales.
- 39.
Eileen Haley, ‘A Catholic Girlhood’ in Sue Higgins and Mary Venner (eds), Women and Sexist Education (Adelaide: The Education Group, Women’s Liberation, 1973), 11.
- 40.
Ibid., 12.
- 41.
Lovell discovered a ‘thick file’ of letters from children in the Ms. archive. See Rotskoff, ‘Little Women Libbers’, 94. Lovell has surveyed a wide range of women’s liberation materials. See Lovell, ‘Girls Are Equal Too’. Although her discussion is not as extensive, Dyhouse also mentions schoolgirl contributions to the British women’s liberation magazine Spare Rib (Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, 204–205).
- 42.
Jenny Garlick, ‘What About Schools?’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971), 11.
- 43.
‘Letters’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 6 (March 1974), 2.
- 44.
Anna Craney, ‘A Day of Scrapes’, Cauldron, 1, no. 3 (1975), 6.
- 45.
Rotskoff, 102.
- 46.
‘Sugar and Spice Middle Class Nice’, Mejane, no. 2 (May 1971), 7.
- 47.
Eulalia, ‘Reflections on Growing Up Italian Australian and Female’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 10 (Autumn 1975), 9.
- 48.
Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, 201.
- 49.
Women on Words and Images, Dick and Jane as Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children’s Readers (Princeton, N.J.: Women on Words and Images, 1972); and Denise Bradley and Mary Mortimer, ‘Sex Role Stereotyping in Children’s Picture Books’, Refractory Girl, no. 1 (Summer 1972–73), 8–14. For a previous discussion of Bradley and Mortimer’s study, as well as that of Patricia Healy and Penny Ryan (noted below) see Jody LY Kok and Bruce Findlay, ‘An Exploration of Sex-Role Stereotyping in Australian Award-winning Children’s Books’, The Australian Library Journal, 55, no. 3 (2006), 251.
- 50.
Bradley and Mortimer, ‘Sex Role Stereotyping’, 10.
- 51.
Ibid., 9.
- 52.
Ibid., 11.
- 53.
Ibid., 14.
- 54.
Ibid., 9.
- 55.
Patricia Healy and Penny Ryan, The Female Image: Sexism in Children’s Books (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales, 1974); and Gabrielle Walsh and Gary Dowsett, School Days, School Days, Good Ol’ Sexist School Days: Combat Sexism Kit (Melbourne: Australian Union of Students, 1976). A summary version of their findings was also published as Patricia Healy and Penny Ryan, ‘Sex Stereotyping in Children’s Books’, in Jan Mercer (ed.), The Other Half: Women in Australian Society (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books Australia, 1975), 247–252.
- 56.
Healy and Ryan, The Female Image, 14.
- 57.
Ibid., 15–16.
- 58.
Ibid., 16.
- 59.
Anne Summers, ‘Women’s Consciousness of their Role-Structure’ (unpublished honours thesis, University of Adelaide, 1970). The content of the essays is discussed in some detail in Bulbeck, Living Feminism, 34, 44.
- 60.
Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 429.
- 61.
Connell, ‘You Can’t Tell Them Apart Nowadays’, quoted in Summers, Damned Whores and Gold’s Police, 475.
- 62.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
- 63.
Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 430.
- 64.
Ibid., 437–438, emphasis in original.
- 65.
In 1976, she helped found the Australian Women’s Education Coalition and, in 1977, she was appointed to chair the Victorian Committee on Equal Opportunity in Schools.
- 66.
A survey of 2,626 school-age girls (aged 12 to 17 years) cited by Sampson had found that 56 percent read the magazine every week or nearly every week. See Shirley Sampson, ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly today … Education and the Aspiration of Girls’, Refractory Girl, no. 3 (Winter 1973), 15.
- 67.
Ibid., 14.
- 68.
Ibid., 15.
- 69.
Ibid., 16, 17.
- 70.
Ibid., 18.
- 71.
Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission, Schools in Australia: Report of the Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1973), 19.
- 72.
On the feminist credentials of the committee, see Mackinnon, ‘Girls, School and Society’, 278.
- 73.
Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society: Report by a Study Group to the Schools Commission (Woden, ACT: Australian Schools Commission, 1975).
- 74.
A chapter on girls with ‘special needs’—namely migrant girls, Aboriginal girls, and girls in rural areas—was included but relegated to the end, resulting in these groups being ‘treated, literally, as appendices to the central problem’ (Yates, The Education of Girls, 98). See also Georgina Tsolidis, ‘Difference and Identity—a Feminist Debate Indicating Directions for the Development of Transformative Curriculum’, Melbourne Studies in Education, 34, no. 1 (1993), 52–53
- 75.
Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society, chap. 3.
- 76.
Ibid., 154.
- 77.
Ken McKinnon, ‘Foreword’, in Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society, iii.
Bibliography
Unpublished Archival Sources
State Library of New South Wales
First Ten Years of Sydney Women’s Liberation Collection, MLMSS 9782: Box 8
Contemporary Printed Sources
‘A Guide to Consciousness-Raising’, Ms., July 1972
‘It’s a Success…’, Womanspeak, 2, no. 2 (February–March 1976)
‘Letters’, Vashti’s Voice, no. 6 (March 1974)
‘Sugar and Spice Middle Class Nice’, Mejane, no. 2 (May 1971)
Bradley, Denise and Mary Mortimer, ‘Sex Role Stereotyping in Children’s Picture Books’, Refractory Girl, no. 1 (Summer 1972–73)
Committee on Social Change and the Education of Women Study Group, Girls, School and Society: Report by a Study Group to the Schools Commission (Woden, ACT: Australian Schools Commission, 1975)
Connell, R. W., ‘You Can’t Tell Them Apart Nowadays, Can You?’, Search, 5, no. 7 (1973), 282–85
Connell, W. F., R. E. Stroobant, K. E. Sinclair, R. W. Connell and K. W. Rogers, 12 to 20: Studies of City Youth (Sydney: Hicks Smith & Sons, 1975)
Craney, Anna, ‘A Day of Scrapes’, Cauldron, 1, no. 3 (1975), 6–7
Eulalia, ‘Reflections on Growing up Italian Australian and Female’,Vashti’s Voice, no. 10 (Autumn 1975)
Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963)
Garlick, Jenny, ‘What About Schools?’, Mejane, no. 1 (March 1971), 11
Haley, Eileen, ‘A Catholic Girlhood’ in Sue Higgins and Mary Venner (eds), Women and Sexist Education (Adelaide: The Education Group, Women’s Liberation, 1973)
Healy, Patricia and Penny Ryan, ‘Sex Stereotyping in Children’s Books’ in Jan Mercer (ed.), The Other Half: Women in Australian Society (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books Australia, 1975), 247–252
Healy, Patricia and Penny Ryan, The Female Image: Sexism in Children’s Books (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales, 1974)
Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission, Schools in Australia: Report of the Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1973)
Millet, Kate, Sexual Politics (1979; reprint of London: Virago, 1977. First published by Doubleday in 1970)
Nicholson, Joyce Thorpe and Daniel Wrixon Thorpe, A Life of Books: The Story of D.W. Thorpe Pty Ltd., 1921–1987 (Middle Park, Vic.: Courtyard Press, 2000)
Nicholson, Joyce, What Society Does to Girls (Carlton, Vic.: Pitman Publishing, 1975; London: Virago, 1977; 2nd ed. London: Virago, 1980)
Oakley, Ann, Sex, Gender and Society (South Melbourne, Vic.: Sun Books, 1972. First published by Temple Smith in 1972)
Sampson, Shirley, ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly Today… Education and the Aspiration of Girls’, Refractory Girl, no. 3 (Winter, 1973), 14–18
Summers, Anne, ‘Women’s Consciousness of their Role-Structure’ (unpublished honours thesis, University of Adelaide, 1970)
Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1975)
Walsh, Gabrielle and Gary Dowsett, School Days, School Days, Good Ol’ Sexist School Days: Combat Sexism Kit (Melbourne: Australian Union of Students, 1976)
Women on Words and Images, Dick and Jane as Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children’s Readers (Princeton, N.J.: Women on Words and Images, 1972)
Secondary Sources
Bellamy, Suzanne, ‘Guthrie, Bessie Jean Thompson (1905–1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1996. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/guthrie-bessie-jean-thompson-10382/text18393
Bulbeck, Chilla, Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Connell, R. W., Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987)
Connell, Raewyn W. and Rebecca Pearse, Gender: In World Perspective, 3rd Edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015)
Curthoys, Ann, ‘Visions, Nightmares, Dreams: Women’s History, 1975’, Australian Historical Studies, 27, no. 106 (1996), 1–13
Djuric, Bonney, Abandon All Hope: A History of Parramatta Girls Industrial School (Perth: Chargan My Book Publisher, 2011)
Dyhouse, Carol, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (London: Zed Books, 2013)
Eisenstein, Hester, Contemporary Feminist Thought (North Sydney, NSW: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984)
Gaskell, Jane and Sandra Taylor, ‘The Women’s Movement in Canadian and Australian Education: From Liberation and Sexism to Boys and Social Justice’, Gender and Education, 15, no. 2 (2003), 151–68
Henry, Kristin and Marlene Derlet, Talking Up a Storm: Nine Women and Consciousness-Raising (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1993)
Lake, Marilyn, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999)
Lovell, Kera, ‘Girls Are Equal Too: Education, Body Politics, and the Making of Teenage Feminism’, Gender Issues, 33, no. 71 (2016), 71–95
Mackinnon, Alison, ‘Girls, School and Society’, Australian Feminist Studies, 21, no. 50 (2006), 275–88
Pettman, Jan, Living in the Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia (North Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1992)
Rotskoff, Lori, and Laura L. Lovett (eds), When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Rotskoff, Lori, ‘“Little Women’s Libbers” and “Freeto Be Kids”: Children and the Struggle for Gender Equality in the United States’ in Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett (eds), When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 92–110
Simic, Zora, ‘“Women’s Writing” and “Feminism”: A History of Intimacy and Estrangement’, Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, no. 28 (2013). http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/zora-simic
Thorne, Barrie, ‘Re-Visioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?’, Gender and Society, 1, no. 1 (1987), 85–109
Tsolidis, Georgina, ‘Difference and Identity—A Feminist Debate Indicating Directions for the Development of Transformative Curriculum’, Melbourne Studies in Education, 34, no. 1 (1993), 51–62
Yates, Lyn, The Education of Girls: Policy, Research and the Question of Gender (Hawthorn, Vic.: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barrett Meyering, I. (2018). The ‘Social Processing Chamber’ of Gender: Australian Second-Wave Feminist Perspectives on Girls’ Socialisation. In: O'Dowd, M., Purvis, J. (eds) A History of the Girl. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69278-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69278-4_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69277-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69278-4
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)