Growing Strong 2023

USyd Womens’ Collective

Growing Strong

Acknowledgement of Country

The USyd Womens’ Collective acknowledges that we organise and operate upon the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, land which was never ceded to Colonial powers. Additionally, this publication was written, edited and distributed on this stolen land. This land remains stolen, it was neither bought nor sold. It must be kept in the forefront of our minds that the Colonial project is one which is ongoing in this country and that by extension non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women still operate in so-called “Australia”. The Colonial regime of dispossession, genocide, exploitation of labour, rape and destruction of Indigenous culture and language thereby affects Black and Indigenous Women of Colour in a manner beyond that of non-Indigenous and non-Black women. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and extend our respects to all Aboriginal staff and students at the University.

Indigenous women are up to 80% more likely to experience sexual violence than non-Indigenous women; they are up to five times more likely to be killed in a homicide, of which more than half are cases of domestic violence. Indigenous land is pillaged and legal claims for traditional ownership are dismissed with ease by mining corporations like Rio Tinto who make out like bandits whilst the same government which enriches them wrings its hands at the suffering of Indigenous populations and cries austerity and “self-empowerment”. The climate crisis, too, must be understood as inseparable from Colonialism and Western Imperialism, centuries in the making.

Indigenous women make up only 2% of the population of so-called “Australia” yet they are 34% of the female prison population. In 2014, a study found that in NSW 70% of incarcerated Indigenous women were sexual abusive survivors; 44% of those women experience ongoing sexual abuse into adulthood. Despite Kevin Rudd’s meagre apology, the Stolen Generation and its legacy continue to harm Indigenous communities. Despite this apology, rates of Indigenous child removal rose 400% after 2007. Don Dale prison remains open and Indigenous people in the Northern Territory continue to be subject to horrific living conditions and oppression in the name of “Australia”. We cannot concede anything to Capitalist-Colonialism, which demonstrably has created the racist framework of incarceration and surveillance that hangs above the heads of Aboriginal people. It is imperative that Decolonisation continues to burn at the centre of Feminist justice and indeed all justice we seek in this country and the world at large. The fire of Decolonisation cannot be allowed to fade in our movement, nor can we be led astray by those who might seek concessions or dismiss its centrality in our activism.

Feminist justice requires that we hold Indigenous justice to be an imperative, to be non-negotiable and noncompromising.

This land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

by the Growing Strong Editorial Team

Cover: Alev Saracoglu. Writers: Alev Saracoglu, Ariana Haghighi, Caitlin O’Keefe, Eliza Crossley, Eloise Park Warren, Grace Heesh, Grace Street, Gracie Mitchell, Iggy Boyd, Lia Perkins, Lily McGuiness, Simone Maddison Artists: Alev Saracoglu, Eloise Park, Jacqui Adams Editorial Team: Alana Ramshaw, Alev Saracoglu, Ariana Haghighi, Eliza Crossley, Eloise Park Warren, Emilie Garcia-Dolnik, Iggy Boyd, Jo Staas, Simone Maddison, Talia Meli

Facebook: usydwoco Instagram: @usydwoco Email: womens.officers@src.usyd.edu.au

Growing Strong

Glossary / Definitions

Binary: having two parts, for example male/female in the gender binary.

Capitalism: our current economic system, in which private actors like corporations and investors control the means of production to further their own financial interests. The Capitalists’ drive for profits occurs at the expense of the Working Class, who are exploited and alienated from their labour.

Capitalist-Patriarchy: the mutually reinforcing relationship between strict class structures and the sexual hierarchy. Since women have historically been excluded from participating in the economic system outside the home and thus from any kind of financial mobility, they are ensnared within an overdependence on men. Men, on the other hand, operate in the upper echelons of wealth in this gendered system.

Cisgender (Cis): a person whose gender identity corresponds with their assigned sex at birth.

Heteronormativity: the perspective of a heterosexual person taken for granted as universal and therefore elevated to the status of natural or privileged. This social norm excludes LGBTQI+ and non-binary groups from mainstream representation.

Dimorphism: a biological term denoting when sexes of the same species exhibit different physical characteristics, especially those which are not necessary for reproduction. Such characteristics, like a woman’s small size or inherently “caregiving” disposition, are often used to justify her reification to the home or endurance of harassment/abuse.

Decolonisation: historically refers to former colonies that have achieved self-governance and ‘independence’ from their oppressors. But the Colonial project is ongoing in all Colonised places, and its legacies can never truly be ‘undone.’ Therefore, Decolonisation describes a movement towards restorative justice, accountability and truth.

Essentialism: the philosophy that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In the context of sex and gender, this is the belief that gender is a discrete and immutable social character. This means that one can either be a male or a female, but not both; what follows is the incorrect assumption that certain attributes of masculinity or femininity are derived from these strict sexual binaries.

Non-Binary: a term describing people who do not identify as male/female or woman/man in the prevailing gender binary.

Eurocentrism: the incorrect belief that the West is the primary architect of human history, and that European culture, history and peoples are therefore the most ‘civilised’ or ‘important.’ Emerging during the 1990s as a result of increased humanitarian aid and ‘decolonization’ efforts from Europe, this term describes the Western narrative of progress, enlightenment and liberalism.

Global North and South: a system of grouping countries according to their socioeconomic and political characteristics, not necessarily referring to the geographical north and south. The Global North typically refers to Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. The Global South is composed of the nations Colonised by the Global North, also referred to as the periphery or semi-periphery

Intersectionality: a concept coined by lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the ways interconnected social identities like race, class and gender can overlap into compounding systems of vulnerability. Intersectional Feminism recognises that there are many different ways women can experience discrimination, and that White Feminism excludes the lived experiences of women of colour, LGBTQ+ women and women in poor socio-economic condition.

Male Gaze: the perspective of a heterosexual Anglo male assumed to be the universal point of view, and therefore imprinted onto any audience or intended audience for mainstream media. The subsequent tendency to sexualise, objectify and abuse women so openly and frequently in the public consciousness sets oppressive and damaging standards for individual behaviours.

Marxism: an economic and political theory drawn from the writings of Karl Marx, the central tenet of which is a critique of the exploitation of workers, alienation of their labour and degradation of their quality of life inherent to Capitalism. Marx’s critique posited that class struggle is the basis of Capitalist modes of production, and that only through a proletarian revolution would the ultimate course of history be realised.

Nuclear Family: the social norm that a family consists of a core unit all living together, usually including two parents and up to three children. Associated with nuclear energy, it is considered in liberal theories to be a foundation or powerhouse of a healthy society.

Misogyny: the foundation of Patriarchy and sexism which thrives off a deep hatred of, contempt for or prejudice against women.

Postcolonialism: the historical period or circumstances representing the aftermath of Colonialism in a previously Colonised nation. This is different to Decolonisation because it accounts for the impacts of oppression and violence against colonised people on their own land.

Reproductive Labour: the unseen and unpaid work like childrearing, cooking, cleaning and laundry women disproportionately complete in the home. While this work is often underappreciated by men in the productive workforce, they are also dependent on it on a daily basis to maintain the pace of their productivity.

Respectability Politics: a concept first articulated by Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham in 1993 to describe the ways activists or minoritized groups attempt to affect social change by making their demands palatable or acceptable to dominant social standards. Higgenbotham expressed this phenomenon to resistance amongst AfricanAmerican women, but it has since been applied to LGBTQ+ and intersectional communities.

“The Personal Is Political”: a Second-Wave Feminist phrase coined by Carol Hanisch to vocalise women’s experiences of oppression in unpaid yet intensive reproductive labour in their personal lives as a political issue worthy of public intervention. As a hallmark of the student movement in the 1970s, this phrase encouraged women to leave their traditional roles as mothers and wives and pursue independence outside the home.

Waves of Feminism: a metaphor chronologically distinguishing between four arguably nominally different movements and generations of Feminism in the West. The First Wave began in 1848 with the Suffragette movement for female emancipation. The Second Wave during the 1970s popularised women’s liberation around issues of reproductive health, sexual freedom and financial independence. The Third Wave, which we are arguably still riding today with the #MeToo movement, pioneered intersectionality, public campaigns decrying sexual violence against women, and critical theories of gender performance.

Growing Strong

What is the Womens’ Collective?

Who are we?

TheUniversity of Sydney Womens’ Collective, commonly known as WoCo, is an autonomous activist space on campus for Women and Non-Binary people (constitutionally it is defined as open to anyone who doesn’t identify as a cis male). We are a radical group of activists involved in organising across campus and beyond. We meet throughout the semester to organise rallies and campaigns but we also host reading groups, round tables and panels to promote radical education. We fight to end rape on campus, for Abolitionist Feminism, for Indigenous sovereignty, for reproductive rights and abortion access, for safe and affordable housing and for an end to the Colleges.

What do we believe?

We are explicitly anti-Capitalist, we understand the injustices central to the Capitalist project and the individual Capitalist “dream”, and we equally understand the interrelation between Capitalism and Patriarchy and of all those chains that bind oppressed people contained therein. Thus we wish for, and act in pursuit of, a world free of Colonialism, of Capitalism, of Patriarchy, and of the overthrow of all oppressions that bear upon the women of the world.

We are anti-Colonial. This university is a deeply Colonial institution. It operates on land stolen from the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and has a dark history of perpetrating violence. Indigenous women have received the lion’s share of Colonial violence, their children have been stolen, they have been harrassed and killed by police. Our collective thus acknowledges that we must fight for First Nations people just as we fight for Feminism.

Similarly, we are Abolitionists and believe that Prison Abolition is a Feminist struggle. Prisons as institutions are inherently violent, and at the hands of guards and police they are a place of intense brutality and high rates of sexual violence.

The female prison population is subject to demeaning and unlivable conditions and an end to these institutions is necessary. We believe that justice for survivors should be healing, not furthering brutality.

We are Eco-Feminist.

We are anti-Racist.

We are for Queer Liberation. Issues around gender identity and sexuality are intrinsically tied.

WoCo is Feminist, anti-Capitalist, anti-Colonial; indeed the Womens’ Collective is many things and thus perhaps at its heart we are intersectional. We understand the social and economic interactions between all forms of oppression and how they manifest in the world.

Want to join?

If this tickles your urge to change the world, please do not hesitate to reach out! We are an inclusive and safe space for non-cis men and would love to have you. To get involved check out our facebook group USYD WoCo 2023, attend any meetings which we will organise this year or contact the conveners (Iggy Boyd and Alev Saracoglu) to ask any questions.

Abortion: Accessibility and Inaccessibility by Anonymous

Ihave always worried. The worst-case scenario is often immediate to me. Abortion is thus a frequent topic of thought for me, like many women and nonbinary people, especially as I watched the overturning of Roe v Wade. Frustrated at this attack on women and genuinely fearful for women’s rights, I’ve spent too many nights dedicated to the researching of abortion. In Australia, one in three women will have an abortion; understanding the process was important to me. Upon researching, I quickly discovered that for someone like me, with the privileges of a support system, secure finances, living near the city, if it came down to it, abortion would be available. Not easy, but available. This is not the case for all women. Abortion remains legal in NSW, but it is not free, and for young, rural, or financially disadvantaged women, just accessing the procedure itself can be extremely difficult. That’s before considering the emotional repercussions and mental health support needed alongside these procedures.

In my time googling, I realised that even getting information from abortion clinics can be difficult. First, it is difficult to tell which GPs provide medical abortions, fewer than you would hope, with only 10% of GPs registered to administer mifepristone, the drug required to induce a miscarriage. Then, for surgical abortions, if you manage to google a clinic geographically close to you, the average cost for the procedure is rarely publicly advertised. To find this out you need to call up directly or worse: take online and google reviews. Abortion costs can vary enormously so finding out if you can afford the procedure at a certain clinic in advance is necessary. This hurdle is even more challenging for those with English as their Second Language.

Access to information is only the first hurdle; getting to a Clinic, GP or Pharmacy the next. Whilst I couldn’t attain how many clinics there are in Sydney, city dwellers have more options. In rural NSW it’s worse. A 2016 study found that women living in rural NSW travelled as many as nine hours, one way, to access

an abortion. Access to tele-abortion is still limited by stringent GP referral criteria; only 1% of GPs are trained to prescribe medical abortions. This is the result of the over-regulation of mifepristone and an opt-in system that leaves many doctors unqualified. If you’re lucky to have termination options nearby, perceived local inconfidentiality and prevalent stigma results in many women still travelling to other areas. Rural women need time to plan more, and it’s more common to get later term abortions, which are drastically more expensive.

The cost of abortions is extreme. In NSW, abortions are most often performed in private clinics, meaning they can become expensive, even whilst eligible for a fractional medicare rebate. Medical and surgical abortions both average around $500 out of pocket up to 12 weeks, with Medicare covering between $30490. After 12 weeks, costs can be up to $4,000 out of pocket for “late-term” abortions. This is already costly for healthcare that principally should be free, but additional indirect expenses like travel, accommodation, childcare, and lost wages can add costs. For rural women even moreso; a study from 2015 found that two-thirds of Australian women seeking an abortion needed financial assistance from others. Our healthcare system is failing these women.

After the surgery, most women need to be driven home, but for those without support systems, getting to and from the clinic is trickier. After a medical abortion, you need a carer to look after you due to the painful termination that can sometimes require an ER trip. Someone without support might not receive this necessary care. Furthermore, unintended pregnancy is often linked to domestic and sexual violence and women who are survivors can have additional hurdles in accessing abortion. Women should feel like they have ownership over their own body, not GPs, not their partners, and not the government. Abortions should be free. Abortion provision and the qualifications required to prescribe mifepristone shouldn’t be an opt-in experience, they should be universally provided.

Courtesy of Honi Soit 1989, Issue 3, Page 5

Growing Strong

Sex Tourism in Australia by Iggy

OnJuly 4th, 2016, news.com.au published an article titled “Do You Think We’ll Pay for Bad Things We’ve Done?’ Revelations of Aussie Sex Tourists in Thailand”, attempting to reproduce the story of the apocryphally named Dan, a rescue worker searching for sex trafficking victims.1

““He tried everything [to fill the void],” says Dan. “Sex with young girls, sex with ladyboys, everything. And then one day he got to a point where he was like, ‘what’s next? What’s left to try?’

“I was sitting next to him, and out on the street in front of us were deaf girls, prostituting. He said: ‘Hmm, deaf girls. Do you think they might be a good root?’”

Dan, being a most chivalrous man as he is, speaks extensively on the suffering of young women, the fulfilment he feels in retrieving them from their captors, but perhaps yet most nobly he dedicates the plurality of his speech in this article to declaring his sympathy for Australian sex tourists and their plight. He calls out to them in the article’s close.

“If I could say everything and anything, I guess it would be: ‘are you happy with who you’ve become, are you happy with this life?’

Boyd

“You can use all your skills and abilities to help people, not to take from them,” he says. “It’s not too late to turn things around and become the man you’re proud of.”

He eloquently persuades these men to give up their cause of exploiting underage and underprivileged women for sex in Thailand and beyond; come back to Australia, where you can exploit underage and unprivileged women for sex in your own country, like a patriot. Sex Tourism is often not covered in popular media, surely on account of the shame it casts on the country and government and that its most insidious element is that it occurs overseas in usually underdeveloped nations. When it is covered, it often portrays violent men as broken in some form, as depressed or lonely or mentally ill, and the women they ruin the lives of are somehow a separate thing, as if sex tourists and the women they have sex with, whether through sex work or otherwise, exist independently of one another.

On March 1, 2004, two Thai sex workers Phuuangsri Kroksamrang and Somjai Imsamram, were found in watery graves, their bodies dumped in the Adelaide River, a stone’s throw from Darwin, by Ben William McLean and Phu Ngoc Trinh. News24, owned by

1 Rawlinson, Revelations of Aussie Sex Tourists in Thailand, 2016.

““He tried everything [to fill the void],” says Dan. “Sex with young girls, sex with ladyboys, everything.””

African media titan Media24, titled their article on the killing “Prostitues thrown to crocs”2. This article is no longer viewable. The Age, covering the story domestically, titled their coverage “Teenager ‘threw’ Thai women in croc river”3. As if it was some wacky hijinks where both parties deserve to be mocked.

The Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Bill 1994 was first introduced to respond to the emerging crisis, but as evidenced by the above case happening in 1994, it couldn’t pull much weight. Since its recognition, about 2 people are tried per year under these laws, according to Sydney Criminal Lawyers. The discussion of child sex tourism, I think, betrays the thought of those who partake, though, for it deposits the issue into one of paedophiles attempting to get away with their crimes in more loosely-tooled police states, instead of what is truly the issue.

Sex Tourism is much more comparable to regular tourism than it is to child sex tourism, “regular” people engage in sex tourism very often and it isn’t a criminal exercise, nor necessarily should we advocate for it to be as abolitionists, but it is nonetheless a “legitimate” or allowable action as perceived by governing bodies. It could be claimed that people are within their rights as individuals to do whatever they like but that would be stupid; it’s clear that men who actively leave the country to chase sex in underdeveloped countries are operating with the same action-producing disposition that men who abuse women in this country are operating under. Patriarchal relations in this country creates, and governs, a disposition in the mind of those who engage in that patriarchal relation as men, this disposition is basically that of physical superiority for that is the main differentiator of men and women, and it is action-producing because it doesn’t just produce a mindset of gender-based superiority

2 Unknown, Prostitutes thrown to crocs, 2005.

(though it does even in very subtle ways) but it encourages men to display physical dominance through action. Sexual dominance is often understood as being related to physical dominance and leaving the country to pursue women, to “the Patriarchy” that is just as much a feat of dominance as slaying the Nemean lion was, just over different Patriarchal pursuits. That is not to say Dan is stopping the next Hercules, the pursuits I’ve called Patriarchal such as physical, “mental” (like modern internet Stoicism) and sexual dominance are value-neutral, or often value-negative; they don’t pursue good things, they pursue pleasurable things. A position of comfort in society as a white man is a pleasurable thing, just as sex is a pleasurable thing.

As I write this I notice that I, too, have fallen into the same trap as Dan for I have made the entire discussion about violent, whether outwardly or not, men instead of their victims. Their victims are very rarely heard, they often come from poor countries already but women who are most often victims of sex tourism are young, underprivileged and desperate. They don’t necessarily have access to online and real-life platforms like the Womens’ Collective to share the situation of their lives to others. It would be foolish to come away from a discussion like this opposing sex work; full de-criminilisation of sex work is a necessary and important thing that should be fought for to ensure the rights of sex workers. Instead I personally take away the thought that the Patriarchal struggle in this country, the privilege that men maintain over women, creates these outcasts which boil over out of the rising steam and rolling froth of our country’s “melting pot” and bring the distinctly “Australian” patriarchal subject to neighbouring countries, like a kind of sexual imperialism engaged in by individuals.

3 Unknown, Teenager ‘Threw’ Thai Women in Croc River, 2004.

The Anatomy Problem

I’mbreathing through my mouth to avoid formaldehyde and wet metal smells entering my nose. Formaldehyde makes you hungry and that’s a sensation best avoided in an anatomy lab. This week we’re learning about the reproductive system. Everyone is trying to adopt a white-lab coat, observe and learn attitude but there’s an almost reverent tension in the class: we know this is sensitive. It is; the mystery and taboo of both internal and external genitalia runs deep in western culture. Such a privileged access to human anatomy is a rare and interesting encounter; as empirical learners, this is for some of us probably the first shame-free encounter with the most loaded and charged body parts of a human. It’s an environment where curiosity and interest, inspection and gazing are essential to learning our science.

As the academic is guiding us through a pelvic specimen, our eyes are fixed on the probe. We watch closely. We are all looking at the same thing, structures and flesh, muscles and membranes but the things we are seeing vary as much as the structures themselves.

For me, I’m looking at a room, partitioned into female and male reproductive specimens. I’m looking at combinations of genitalia and organs that fit textbook descriptions of the “biological” divide between what makes man and what makes woman. Gender Essentialism at its barest.

I’m not seeing me.

The way I understand my body, as genderless fleshy bits assembled — as just and only parts of a body— was not being taught or heard by a room of future science thinkers. A familiar body map was on display but the narrative that accompanied the cold, formaldehyde soaked structures was unrecognisable to me. Paradoxically, this “normal” body map is probably unrecognisable for many people.

by Grace Heesh

It is in moments like these that what Feminists in the 1980-90s called The Anatomy Problem stares you down. Anatomy appears essentially accomplished. We dissect skin and tissues, to unearth the mysteries of the human body, its structures and their relation to each other. As primarily based on cadaveric study, it is a practice described by Focault as seeing past “that which hides and envelopes, the curtain of night over truth” which is “paradoxically, life; and death on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body” In this field, the body through and after death is claimed for medicine, for a universalization of flesh in life.

In this anatomy class, we were attempting, through textbooks and lab classes, to know the body as an abstract map. Until this class, to me it appeared to be a very apolitical task. All arm muscles and blood supply, innervation and cartilage. But this body map that we were all trying to know is as carefully constructed, maintained and bordered as an atlas. Despite our best efforts, no human endeavour can escape projections of social and political thinking, subjective thought and personal agendas. Anatomy is certainly no different. Who gets to be an anatomist anyway? Why do we choose to look at the body this way and what purpose does this ‘universal’ map of human corporeality serve?

Feminist scholars have been investigating these questions in recent decades, keen to dismantle and dissect this insular field. The clitoris has been at the centre of this redrawing of the body map, as an organ often missing or only partly visible in depictions of anatomy before the mid-20th century. Its ‘rediscovery’ and ‘reclamation’ by Feminists in the Second-Wave, has seen a shift in medical texts. Once hidden and alien, the clitoris was described as a lesser homologue to the penis. But, thirty years later, with considerable activism and collectivism we see it labelled in textbooks and its function described. It is independent of the penis and its deep, once hidden structures have now entered a popular science discourse.

It becomes clear that applying a critical sociological lens to an apparently stable and insular science has shown how, as Feminist health sociologists L.J. Moore and A.E. Clarke note, anatomy is “intrinsically unstable and changing”...”(it) require(s) regular rearticulation and reframing to maintain (its) cutting (i.e., classificatory) edge.”

The map is made to be reconfigured. As we move forward in the field of anatomy, this map must contain new links to humanness. Roads to the subjective corporeal experience that comes with being a human and having a body, no matter how the bits are assembled. When we look at models of our muscles and organs, our skin and bone, we must all be able to see ourselves.

Beyond this discussion, and understanding the above, we now know that this was the work of white, cis-gendered, able-bodied and educated Feminists thirty years ago. There is work to be done to make the anatomical body map inclusive and safe for people traditionally locked out of this ‘universalisation’ project. Trans and genderfluid bodies, intersex bodies, non-white, fat and disabled bodies are still obviously missing from anatomy texts and classroom resources. Future medical practitioners enter medicine with a learned human, an abstract body that is produced by Western hegemony. This is dangerous and not representative of the diversity that appears when human bodies are assembled and move through the world.

“If you are on the moon, or off the moon?

If you are seeking a body or displaying one run off dreaming carny, corny and carnal

Still no body wants to become no body. Remember that when you are discovered in all your figura borders of the Real, surrounded clashing arms and legs

even sleep is aching with it

while Glory bathes our moon with massacre.” -Trish Salah, from, notes towards dropping out (March 1995)

“Who gets to be an anatomist anyway? Why do we choose to look at the body this way and what purpose does this ‘universal’ map of human corporeality serve?”

Growing Strong

The History of Bessie Guthrie

Bessie Guthrie, born Bessie Mitchell (unfortunately no relation) in 1905, played a major role in both the first and second waves of Feminism in Sydney and was a local to Sydney University, living at 97 Derwent Street for almost her entire life. As a child, Guthrie was largely educated by her schoolteacher aunts, Janet and Margaret Mitchell, who schooled Guthrie in the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft. Inspired, Guthrie’s aunts imparted their myriad knowledge to her. Aunt Janet apparently told Guthrie to “‘never iron men’s shirts,” a key principle which Guthrie would bring into her Feminist activism.

Guthrie began her career in the 1920s as a furniture designer, operating largely within inner city Bohemian circles. First-wave Feminism was ripe in Sydney then. Most strongly associated with the suffragette movement of the early 20th-century, in Australia the movement sought to allow white women to vote in elections and stand for parliament. By the 1920s, this Feminist wave manifested in the push for more women to enter workplaces, including factories, and medicine, leaving the house and gaining economic independence. This would eventually give way to Second-Wave Feminism, which emerged in the mid-1960s. Guthrie was born at a time when white Australian women were beginning to question their assumed social position as inferior to the white man, granting her activist proclivities a platform to shine.

Guthrie wrote for numerous women’s magazines in Sydney during the 1930s, emphasising the importance of recognising women’s ‘social reproduction’ in the domestic sphere. Further spurred by her passion for writing, Guthrie established her own publishing company, Viking Press, in 1939. She ran it at her Derwent Street home, primarily publishing anti-war poetry during the 1940s until ultimately being forced to close due to wartime paper shortages.

Guthrie continued her activism during and after the war. In 1945, she accepted the position as secretary of publicity at the Young Women’s Christian Association, an organisation established to “provide, under one roof, a Home for women and girls who need it.”

by Gracie Mitchell

In the 1950s, Guthrie opened her Derwent Street house to young girls who were escaping domestic violence and abuse, wishing to help alleviate the problem of institutionalised abuse of women. 97 Derwent Street ultimately became a halfway house for women during a time where help for women fleeing violent situations was scarce.

The Women’s Liberation Movements in the 1970s granted Guthrie a broader platform. With her wealth of experience from Feminism’s First-Wave, she was very important to the beginning of the movement; she was a primary mentor for many of the city’s early Women’s Libbers, helping them to form their aims and actions. Guthrie joined the Women’s Liberation House at 67 Glebe Point Road in 1970, a house established as a Feminist-only space where Feminists gathered to discuss their movement’s aims. Guthrie also wrote for the Mejane, Australia’s second-ever Feminist newsletter, printed from the front room of the Women’s Liberation House, focusing on educating young women as the ethos of Second-Wave Feminism

Before she passed away in 1977, Guthrie was also integral in the formation of the Elsie Refuge, Australia’s first secular refuge for women and children operated by women alone. The establishment of Elsie aimed to raise public awareness of domestic violence show women the options available to those fleeing from violent situations. Elsie paved the way for other female refuges that continue to operate today.

Guthrie’s life as a Feminist activist, writer, and educator reminds us of the hard work yet rewards that emerge from fierce dedication to a political cause. Indeed, there is much that we modern Feminists can learn from Guthrie – namely, that action demands endurance; endurance requires knowledge; and knowledge requires dedication. When we inevitably feel as though the issues we face in 2023 are too difficult to transform, let us look back to the women who came before us and remind ourselves that change for the better has been engendered in the past; it can, therefore, be engendered today.

Women Writing Women, Women Seeing Women

by Eloise Park Warren

Helene Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa ponders the significance of women’s writing: that to see oneself in art is to truly understand one’s existence, or to very well exist at all. Cixous stresses that only women can write women into existence, for “[w]oman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement.” The consequences of women’s absence from writing has created a dark age, an “enormity of repression that has kept women in the dark . . . about herself”. Women, never having seen herself in literature or art, cannot see herself as fully human. Given that women do exist as fully capable of full emotions, without the ability to share within a collective womanhood they begin to see monsters in themselves.

“Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives . . . hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?”

The novel form has a high concentration of women. Historically, Capitalist-Patriarchal relations disallowed women to write in equal quantities to men. Despite this, women have been writing novels for as long as novels have existed. The title of First Novel is oft argued, claimed by texts such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Thomas Malory’s Le Mort D’Arthur (c. 1470). Yet, it is equally claimed by women the likes of Aphra Behn with her text Oroonoko (1688) and Murusaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (1010). During its long conception, the novel was considered a lower form of art — which allowed women access into the medium.

During the 1890s, women’s writing took a turn for the new with the creation of the New Woman archetype. She was characterised as masculine and progressive, eschewing the traditional role of women, marriage and childbearing. She can be understood as a Feminist ideal of the period, a means for women to witness a radical womanhood; a womanhood involved with education, personal autonomy, mobility, and understanding of social and sexual gendered expectations.

But the struggle of women’s artistic existence is not of the past. Ursula Le Guin speaks of her struggles in writing womanhood within her genre-defining Earthsea series. When Le Guin began in 1966, men “were at the centre of [fiction].” The misogyny of her upbringing inspired a misogynistic world in her fantasy, and became the reason for her including a masculine protagonist for her first three installments. Le Guin states: “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard.”

“I do make up things that didn’t exist before, by naming things.”

This formation of identity in the novel — the ability to write oneself into existence — was not shared by all women. Virginia Wolff’s lauded observation that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” in A Room of One’s Own illuminates the classism and racism present within the world of the novel. Now there are women in writing, but only certain women: upper-class, white, cis, straight. The novel, while being championed as a tool for women’s liberty, has excluded women who can’t meet this.

Disturbing the Peace

by Alev Saracoglu

“Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

- James Baldwin

It’sbecome almost ritualistic – gathering in the sombre of the Womens’ Room, grappling with management’s failure to respond to the latest findings on sexual violence at university. Since 2016, that has included the first National Student Safety Survey, the Red Zone Report, the Broderick Review into College Culture, and most recently another National Student Safety Survey. Reflecting on the last survey, the irony of the word safety is not lost on me.

The illusion of safety is one that hinges on violence, denial and suppression.

The term safe space is one I’ve witnessed firsthand leveraged as a way to undermine abuse allegations, working to guilt those shattering the illusion of safety for making the space unsafe (it’s for this very reason the Womens’ Collective identifies rather as a practicing space). Management operates in a similar way, albeit through more complex mechanisms.

University policy exists to protect students from perpetrators like sexual predators — technically. The reality is I’ve seen it more effectively used as a way to gag student activists than to bring about any justice for victim-survivors. It’s not a coincidence that the vast majority of the times I’ve seen misconduct allegations lodged it has been pertaining to Feminist activism. When Bettina Arndt – a sex therapist who believes there is a “rape crisis scare campaign” – gave their talk “Is there a rape crisis on campuses”, protestors were hit by misconduct allegations. And while the Catholic Society and LifeChoice – an anti-choice or “pro-life” club - are allowed to peddle harmful misinformation about reproduction at our university which supposedly cares about intellectual honesty,

and serve as a lightning rod for Nazis to come onto campus, it’s protestors who are penalised. It’s mockery for policy - almost laughable - if outlandish accusations like glitter bombing and leaving a bottle of piss at the LifeChoice stall didn’t threaten enrolment.

When that isn’t enough, the university will not shy away from brutality.

While we’re granted some rooms as safe spaces on campus, our supposed safety is enforced by campus security. Our university employs Wilson Security, the company that wreaked terror upon refugees in Manus and Nauru up until 2017. They’ve colluded on many occasions with university management and the police in order to shut down protests by allowing undercover cops onto campus, sharing security footage to identify activists, and subjecting students to police brutality. The violence of our university knows no bounds, being complicit in waging wars overseas in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen; having affiliations with weapons and security companies Thales, which our Chancellor - Belinda Hutchinson – just so happens to be CEO of, and BAE Systems.

Our university is a microcosm for the violence-waged everyday in the guise of safety. The most pertinent example is the NT Intervention, where conditions akin to apartheid have been implemented based on fabricated claims of paedophile rings in Aboriginal communities and needing to “protect Aboriginal children” from sexual abuse. Amongst its many detrimental impacts is an increase in the Aboriginal incarceration rate — doubling for men and tripling for women — further contributing to Aboriginal people being the most incarcerated people in the world.

This sowing of doubt through infantilization by projecting a sense of defencelessness is almost always the first step in justifying violence against that person. As Jean Kilbourne said, “[t]he person is dehumanised and violence becomes inevitable”. When we’re conditioned not to trust anyone – not even our own judgement –this makes room for the kind of reductive thinking where people are essentialised as inherently good or bad and must be dealt with accordingly, the logical conclusion of which is not preventative measures and rehabilitation, but imprisonment. It’s not hard to see the implications this has for marginalised communities. As Angela Davis said:

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”

To seek out the cocoon of safety is to turn inwards. It’s to live in fear; it’s to lose faith in everyone –including ourselves – and our ability to change the world around us. But peace of mind does not come from having safety dictated to us by institutions like our university that try to pacify us with an arbitrary online consent module and hollow consent merchandise then turn around and threaten us when we aren’t. It comes from resistance — empowerment in camaraderie — that can only be realised through the fight for abolition. We have a world to win.

Growing Strong

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder...

To visit a shopping mall; to watch television; to walk down the street is to learn to resent one’s body. The model posing on Brandy Melville’s Instagram page is a reminder that your hips are too wide. The bare skin advertising shaving cream on the side of your homeward-bound bus taunts the hair growing thick on your legs and neck. Even Priceline, a bastion of health and care, cheats you of any concealer which does not reflect the sun flooding through the store’s skylight.

It is unsurprising, then, that colour and shape are the two most recurring and resounding bodily insecurities expressed by women around the world. These feelings are Colonial, in their obsessions with Anglo-American standards of femininity; they are Capitalist, in the profits they pry from women’s pain; above all, they are hyper-sexualised, in their need to entertain the male gaze. Without them, we are led to believe that we would not know who we are. But in their presence, we are only worth more when we make ourselves less.

Historically, beauty has been synonymous with hygiene. The first recorded cosmetic product was ancient Egyptian kohl eyeliner, coveted primarily as a status symbol distinguishing affluent individuals from the indentured poor. While technology developed away from the use of antimony and expanded to include lipsticks and oils, its meaning remained the same. When the eighteenth-century European soap burgeoned as the first commercial cosmetic market, so too did the elite’s commitment to keeping the masses unwashed.

Britain’s monopoly on this commercial market buttressed its growing Colonial and military power. To be dirty was to be uncivilised; to be beautiful was to have blonde hair, blue eyes, a small nose, an impossibly thin waist. Despite their existence in places like Rome and Greece since 200 BC, skin lightening techniques didn’t exist in India before their introduction by the British. In attempts to replace what Colonial ethnographer HH Risley called “dead black primitives” with “strong pale Aryans”, Kenyan women were made to cut their hair and adopt Eurocentric hairstyles.

Yet at the same time as a constitutional ban on all non-white contestants from the Miss America pageant, tanned skin gained popularity amongst Anglo women as a sign of indoor labour and education. Ethnic features were seized upon as exotic make-up fads, including the enduringly prevalent fox-eye, lip filler and BBL trends. Skin-bleaching itself is still practiced widely in Asia, with an expected market worth of 24 billion USD by 2027.

Racism is melted into these elitist foundations, like bronzed contour lines intersecting a painted porcelain cheekbone. Testaments of progress in supposedly “post-colonial” nations like Australia are continuously undermined by colourist controversies, the most recent of which surrounded a woman transitioning to lighter skin and achieving luminous beauty in a 2011 Dove advertisement. As Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay historian Frances Peters-Little argues, one does not have too hard to find remnants of the anti-Indigenous tropes used to market Dove’s Nulla Nulla soap in 1901. It therefore appears to follow naturally that Iran has the highest rate of nose jobs in the world, and that 1.3 million people have undergone double eyelid surgery today.

Yet despite the health risks of these pursuits, it is our collective failure to meet global beauty standards which makes their industry so lucrative. Since launching its first beauty cleansing bar in 1957, Dove has achieved a total market value of 5.1 billion USD; its parent company, Unilever, is the richest cosmetics company ever. Despite up to one third of all ingredients being sourced through sweatshops or child labour, beauty products are the world’s fifty-seventh most-traded commodity. From this increasingly globalised competition grows greed, guilt and grief, felt most strongly by the women who cannot keep up.

...And Sephora, And Victoria’s Secret, And Zara

All of this exploitation occurs under the protective yet punishing purview of a patriarchal eye. Whether it be Jezebel painting her eyelids in the Bible’s Old Testament, Princess Shouyang applying plum blossom makeup during the Chinese Tang Dynasty or ancient Japanese geishas applying crushed safflower as lipstick, cosmetics have always fulfilled stereotypes of delicacy, paleness and femininity. Bolder pinks and red gained notoriety amongst Italian actresses and Spanish sex workers until the sixteenth-century, when this outward expression of sexuality became vulgar and obscene It was not until the 1920s that make-up would become associated with glamour and widely accessible, much less a staple without which many women oppressively feel they cannot leave the house.

Of course, cosmetics can be reclaimed as expressions of gender, identity and resistance — and have been by LGBTQ+ and women’s communities. Popularised by gay men as a means of self-identification at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn during the 1960s, make-up became an activist symbol of what historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls “respectability politics” and inclusion within mainstream standards. Now a hallmark of self-expression for trans women and drag queens, cosmetics can provide an empowering connection to one’s sexuality.

But attempts to decolonise and queer beauty standards are continuously overshadowed by Capitalist legacies. Not only do MAC’s genderless campaign and Urban Decay’s partnership with Ruby Rose siphon funds directly to billionaire CEOs, but they do so at the expense of genuine intersectional representation and legal, political or social support for the vulnerable communities their products prey upon.

We will always get lost in the search for the ideal woman because she does not exist; to think of the power we would hold if we stopped letting colours and shapes control us.

Words by Simone Maddison

Growing Strong

Lychee-Flesh

by Caitlin O-Keefe

Toasted cheese sandwiches, garnished with a sprig of parsley from the garden, made fancy in a quietly desperate plea for ignorance that it’s the third time that week I have served it for dinner. She grew that parsley, when the future had room for the next harvest, when it contained more than sharp absences and fossilised hope. In her account of her mother’s death, Simone de Beauvoir remarks, it’s a hard task, dying, when one loves life so much 1 I think she’s right about my Mum too.

In the west, scientists have busied themselves ‘discovering’ the mind-body connection, colonising knowledge that has been known for millennia. I scroll past pastel pink Instagram squares, that detail exactly how the body can keep score, making what et al says widely consumable.

The personal is political. The political is cellular. Her childhood is known to me through fragments, but as those Instagram squares dictate, stories aren’t only told through words. I blame her cancer on his alcoholism, a future written from the first strike of belt on baby fat flesh. We cheered every time Annastacia Palaszczuk extended the border closure, knowing that he would never risk being locked out, and so became locked in.

We had spent two weeks inside when her body’s memory surfaced through a mammogram, three tumours in the breast, one under her arm, one in the muscle between the ribs. The papers left on the kitchen bench diagnosed triple negative breast cancer locally advanced and were accompanied by ultrasound films with globs that I would study, as though sheer will was enough to understand her cancer and its long-term prognosis. In the languid afternoon sun, catching on the two eyelashes that chemo didn’t reach, I wonder if it missed any other fastgrowing cells.

Six months after her body scans were all clear, her left pupil grew. Justice has no coordinates, no tautology, I read the month after they found the six lesions in her brain.2 No such moral arc of justice exists from political movement, down to our cells. Oddly, it makes the finding of the tumours easier to stomach, that life can just be unfair without any greater morality attached.

The dusk is bruised by me asking “What does a brain tumour feel like? Like when you are chopping up a brain?”

They stand, going through the ritual of making a cup of tea with such precision it takes no imagination to see them in a lab dissecting a cadaver.

“it’s like, lychee flesh”

“Huh”

With my cup of tea, I get a hug, the kind that I have to pull away from before my cheeks become tear stained and the evening written off.

1 Beauvoir, Simone de. A Very Easy Death. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1969.

2 Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2016.

I buy four lychees on my way home. They aren’t in season. I transfer money from my savings and consider how easy it would be to slip them in my pocket, the only thing stopping me is the paranoid thought that perhaps justice does exist in the form of some godly scales, and they would tip against my favour, robbing me of time with her. Cancer is more omnipresent than any god I have known.

Lychees are softer than I remembered. Medical imaging technology is forgiven for its inability to show the difference between tumours and scarring from radiation on the brain. I don’t forgive the oncologists whose answer to that unknown was to inspect her brain up close, cutting through scalp into person.

Mum says no to the operation, men with Dr. honorifics and years of medical training that view death as failure, argue against her. My Mum’s brain is something for them to reach inside, as though one’s spirit wasn’t attached to the soft goop that they seek to dig in. I feared my Mum being lost through their intrusion, a part dying while she still breathed.

I had never thought about what motherhood is before now, never properly. A tether linking before to now. That motherhood is more than just a medium, but an act of resistance; creating the very futures that theory can only imagine.

Hugs, and band aids on grazed elbows and dinners in our front yard just because we have never done that before and the air in the house has become so stale with heat that our hair sticks to the back of our necks. How I would sit on the floor of the kitchen reading aloud from whatever book I chose while she cooked dinner. The quiet resistances of the everyday.

This resistance is forgotten in the celebration of progress (white women in pantsuits declaring war).

A miracle comes in the form of spinal fluid in the brain. The operation is called off. I am glad. After her mastectomy Audre Lorde writes of living through despair, through fear -

“It means trout fishing on the Missisquoi River at dawn and tasting the green silence, and knowing that this beauty too is mine forever.”3

My Mum is dying, and I am scared. But fear can live among other things too, and when she lays on my lap, looking out into the back garden quietly observing each bird that visits the garden, I know that to be true.

3 Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1990.

Growing Strong The University of Sydney Catholic Society and George Pell

An Investigation by Lia Perkins

Content warning: Sexual Violence

TheUniversity of Sydney Catholic Society (CathSoc) chose to honour George Pell’s memory with a post after his death in mid January. The society and Catholic Chaplaincy have significant and very enriching connections to the religious right and hold an unparalleled influence on campus. Understanding and opposing the bigoted positions of the society and their willingness to ignore institutional child sexual abuse is necessary for the safety of students at USyd.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that Pell, and many other senior church figures knew about instances of child sexual abuse and completely failed to act. CathSoc entirely disregard this legacy and following his death published the following statement; “[t]hose who know him well know him to be a humble, reserved man of good old-fashioned Australian humour and acerbic wit. Above all, he was a man of letters and deep faith whose pastoral sensitivity and paternal solicitude were his greatest qualities.”

In an excellent reply to this statement on the Catholic Society’s Facebook page, SRC Disability Officer, and previously Interfaith Officer, Khanh Tran, noted that “[o]rthodoxy in and of itself is not worth celebrating if it means trampling on survivors of sex abuse and the profound criticism of Pell’s (and the Church’s) deeply unsatisfactory and incomplete response to this crisis.”

Surely it is also deeply dishonest to suggest that George Pell’s victims simply didn’t “know him well” enough.

Following Pell’s death, it came to light that CathSoc have a “shrine” to George Pell in the USyd Catholic Chapel and Student Centre on City Road. I was determined to find this shrine, because the content and awareness of the shrine was not well known, and such proud statements as a shrine to a sex predator is clearly not visible when CathSoc attempt to recruit new members during Welcome Week.

CathSoc’s biggest platforming and celebration of Pell occurred in 2012, when they invited him to a Q&A at their annual LifeWeek. Across 6 videos still available on YouTube, Pell is introduced as someone who has “publicly spoken out against abortion”, “a climate change sceptic” and “disagrees with the use of any form of artificial contraception”.

CathSoc’s connections to Pell are deeply concerning, but their events throughout the year continue to raise alarm around their views on women, people with a disability, queer people and marginalised groups. The celebration of ‘LifeWeek’ frequently includes public events and stunts such as which deride disabled students and advocate for anti-abortion stances.

In 2022, during “LifeWeek” CathSoc chose to dismiss the lives of others with an ableist sign in the middle of Eastern Avenue, showcasing a poll which asked “are disabled people a burden on society?”

The 2022 SRC Disability Collective responded in Honi Soit, “[d]isabled people are routinely used as props in other people’s campaigns. Regardless of the intentions behind the stunt, it was poorly thought out and ultimately harmful. There are so many disabled students on campus, and passing signs asking students to weigh in on the worth of your existence is incredibly confronting.”

In 2017 the Catholic Society held a ‘vote no’ to marriage equality rally on campus, which was counter-protested by students. Similarly, in 2016 the Queer Collective (QUAC) protested a talk titled “Men + Women = Made for Each Other?” from James Parker, a prominent advocate of conversion therapy.

De-registration for CathSoc, as a USU club, has been raised various times in years past but just like the Catholic Church, any “legislative” action against reactionary groups can open questions of what those same precedents would offer to the religious right on campus. If CathSoc were to be de-registered, they could wield that

It’s Nurse or Nothing by

“what do you study?”

I’mpretty sure every uni student is familiar with this exchange. I’ll admit, the responses I get when I say “Oh, I do nursing” are a pleasant stroke of the ego. Who doesn’t want to be told they’re superhuman, selfless, or brave.

We value nurses, more so after the pandemic. They’re a fixture on the list of essential workers praised for their efforts through COVID. But this praise isn’t reflected in patient ratios nor pay checks. Women make up around 89% of registered nurses in so-called Australia, yet they’re paid around $128 less per week than male nurses. This is linked to the “glass escalator” effect which allows for men to be fast tracked into higher positions to retain them, to fight the global nursing shortage.

Nearly every male student nurse I’ve spoken to describes the “oh wow” response when they are asked “what do you study?”. There’s instinctive shock at men undertaking “women’s work”. Because that’s what nursing is — the caring profession built by women. Early nurses pioneered in nutrition, sanitation, and statistics, under the shadow of men lacking the holistic view of patients coming from hours bathing, feeding, and medicating them. During the Crimean War, women like Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole drastically reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living conditions by making rounds with wounded soldiers, doing work men didn’t want to, delegated under patriarchy. Hidden within the response I get after saying I study nursing, the “oh wow, you’re superhuman for doing that”, is something else, something of a “yeah, that makes sense”. Because, if we’re honest, I’m doing what society says I should. Funnily enough, I get “I could never do that” from women a lot more than men; for men, a career in nursing is rarely a consideration. For women, it’s what society tells them they’re meant to do, the same way it tells us to become mothers; because under Patriarchy, a woman’s ultimate job is providing care.

I need to make something clear: I’m in no position to complain about the struggles of a registered nurse

Lily McGuinness

“oh, I could never do that......”

working under NSW Health. I’m green as green can be and won’t receive a cent for my time in hospitals for another year. I may not be qualified to care for a patient unsupervised, but I’m qualified to speak on how people see women embarking on a nursing career. These perceptions are important; they’re a microcosm encapsulating how we see women, and the roles we subconsciously place them in, in society. You only need take one look at the red and white latex on offer at Halloween to know what the male gaze sees in a nurse. A female student nurse sees it in practice. She feels it in the “well dones” and “good girls” she gets from men after taking their blood pressure. I’m not trying to make some revolutionary point by saying men like to be cared for by young women (that’s old news) - I’m asking what it means for me and other women embarking on this career. How do we carry this knowledge with us onto a ward for the first time, without the legitimacy of being an RN — just a girl, a student on placement. In class, my tutor helped female students brainstorm responses to inappropriate advances from male patients. On my first placement, I would run the list of responses through my head while approaching a male patient’s bed. Sometimes being in a bay on the ward, surrounded by men, I felt I was on display. It occurs to me, however, that’s the way I feel walking down the street at night.

So, to women who say to me “I could never do that” when talking about placement… you will. You’ll do it walking home from the pub. If you become a mother, you’ll do it cleaning up after your children. You’ll do it if your partner or father gets sick. You’ll do it in whatever workplace you choose, because that’s where men are before coming into hospital.

“good girl”

“well done”

There’s a reason nurses still call each other “sister”. It’s a relic from another time when nurses almost always worked under religious institutions. Despite a growing cohort of brilliant male nurses, the job is still statistically and, in its subconscious perception, women’s work. I highly doubt that’ll change over the span of my career, in many ways I’m okay with that. It’s a sisterhood, as cliché as it sounds. I’m proud to join it.

“oh wow, you’re superhuman for doing that”

“yeah, that makes sense”

From the Micro to the Macro: New Year, Same Expectations

Chez moi: In our own home

Sitting around a table filled with steaming plates of food being passed around. Exchanging gifts meticulously chosen and wrapped for each person. Dancing and partying as the countdown begins for a new year. These are scenes familiar to most of us across time and place, bringing back glowing memories of childhood and family, and eager anticipation of future celebrations.

But upon closer inspection, these labour-intensive events are enjoyed by all but only directed and executed by a few. Namely, the women in our lives who tend to bear the burden of domestic duties involving organisation, gift-giving, cooking, and cleaning. A common image is that of men sitting down or socialising in the meantime, enforcing a sexual division of labour rooted in traditional gender roles. Amidst calls for their help from the kitchen, they protest and cite beliefs of women’s natural superiority in caregiving and household roles. Justified in their supposed inability to perform as well, they are excused from ever having to try.

Chez nous: In all of our homes

This structure is reminiscent of the breadwinner, nuclear family model common in Western liberal societies. The household and sexual division of labour is prized for its theoretical efficiency and improvements in productivity through specialisation. Gary Becker’s New Home Economics model typifies the dehumanisation of households and its members who are viewed as Human Capital. However, a division of labour based on gender is linked to women’s lower hourly earnings than men. As such, they have a reduced ability to be self-sufficient, independent and enjoy leisure time. This is a well-known truth — debates about the gender wage gap were introduced with Second-Wave Feminism and persist today.

Yet the burden of household and reproductive work remains unjust for any woman because it is an institutional, rather than individual, issue. The systematic exploitation of women, their bodies, and their time is one of the pillars of CapitalistPatriarchy — the term coined by sociologist Maria Mies — whereby women reproduce and raise children as the future labour force. This includes both physical and emotional labour – making food, organising the family’s schedule, providing love and affection, cleaning, being a role model and exemplar worker of society. Carol Hanisch’s groundbreaking early Feminist phrase and essay The Personal is Political springs to mind, given that the household does not exist in a vacuum.

Traditional understandings of separate public and private spheres seek to cover up their interconnectedness and justify the devaluing of women’s work. The idea of a public sphere in which workers go out to earn money and engage in the world of politics means that reproductive work in the private sphere is obscured and undervalued. Coupled with the binaries pitting waged and productive work against unwaged and unproductive work, it is difficult to see the normalised undervaluing of reproductive and household work performed by women.

Theoretical approaches to measuring value

But what constitutes productive work? Are these categories productive in themselves? Where Marx provided a clear definition of productive’goods being produced in markets, strands of Social Reproduction Theory and Autonomist Marxist Feminists argue that reproductive work should be considered as productive. Alternative conceptions of measuring value have been proposed by theorists such as Alessandra Mezzadri and her Value Theory of Inclusion which seeks to make visible all forms of exploitation that create value and, hence, centres labour instead of wages.

Moving away from solely considering labour in terms of its direct productive value and contribution to national income, a more holistic approach that takes the whole process of production and reproduction is necessary to understand the complex conditions of women’s labour.

Measuring labour and value in the Australian context

In Australia, the census has only included questions about unpaid work since 2006 — almost exclusively in the categories of unpaid domestic work, care, and voluntary work. A 2022 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation policy brief identified that unpaid work counted for 41.3% of Australia’s GDP. Whilst this ratio is enormous, it does not tell the whole story about unpaid reproductive work and who performs it. The Australian 2020-21 Time Use Survey revealed that men performed 4.3 hours of contracted paid work and 2.7 hours of unpaid care work; these numbers were almost completely inverted for women, but with women performing almost half an hour extra of labour total each day. On average, the additional time that men spend at work does not compensate for their subpar contributions to reproductive work and women’s total labour time.

Intertwining identities: Race, gender and class

Although it is a symptom of a patriarchal society, approaching this issue solely as an illness of gender does not begin to scratch the surface of its origins and manifestations. To be sure, race and age have recently been woven into gender pay gap statistics. Yet they are rarely considered when discussing unpaid work or other identities related to class and sexuality.

These intersections bear strong links to the histories of exploitation, slave labour, sexual assault and genocide necessary for Capitalist development. In particular, Marie Mies’ work looks to patriarchy on a global scale and interrogates the origins of Capitalism that required the exploitation of women’s bodies, peasants, and Colonies.

Today, these legacies leave women of colour overrepresented in roles such as childcare and cleaning — work that is undervalued and often demonised.

As more middle-class white women enter the productive workforce, they employ vulnerable women as cleaners and child carers to instead perform their reproductive work. Individualised and informal arrangements of childcare form the majority in most places, such as the United States, which means they are left unprotected by legislation and unionisation in precarious work.

What may appear to be a private issue unique to each household evidently runs deeper – the centrality, but invisibility, of reproductive labour is a systemic issue. Moving away from the focus on upper-class and white women of First Wave Feminism, the collective search for equality and emancipation of later waves is essential. Beyond just how gender inequality manifests in our own personal lives, we must question our role in perpetuating cycles of unpaid, undervalued and unseen work amongst marginalised groups of women.

Words by Grace Street

Growing Strong

Gender Inequality Pervades:

Anthropogenic climate change is causing more frequent, more violent natural disasters, and women are on the front lines. It has been established that communities in the Global South are being hit first and hardest by the impacts of the climate crisis, but a less-discussed intersection is that the impacts of climate disasters are also overwhelmingly and consistently gendered. During and following natural disasters, women and girls are more likely to die, incur injuries, and miss out on education opportunities. They experience more violence, poverty, and increased laborious work following a disaster than their male counterparts. On average, women outnumber men 14 to 1 among natural disaster deaths. Overall, the consequences of climate change are deeply intertwined with existing gender inequalities and as such the rights of women need to be recognised to respond to the climate crisis.

The stark difference in survival rates between men and women following the 1991 cyclone and flood in Bangladesh illustrates how existing social disadvantage does not stop at inequality but is an active cause of death for women. In Bangladesh, many women had not been taught to swim, they did not know how to drive or own cars, and they were less likely to work in public spaces where warning information was being spread. This meant they were less able to escape the flood waters and consequently 90% of the 140,000 deaths were women.

This disaster is not an isolated example nor one confined only to the past. Similar disadvantages meant that after Cyclone Nargis (2008) in Myanmar, 61% of the fatalities were women, and 77% of fatalities from the Banda Aceh tsunami (2004) were women.

The tragedy of losing these women compounds. With every disaster, each more severe than the last, the loss of mothers, sisters, and aunts further disadvantages young girls who step into their (often domestic) roles and fill the gaps left by the women who died.

This means that it is often expected that girls in regions healing from natural disasters sacrifice their education to provide for their families. Studies of responses to drought and flood in India starting in the 1970s revealed that in years following disasters, girls were 19% less likely to ever attend primary school.

Baghyalaxmi, a teenage girl who lost her mother in the aforementioned Banda Aceh tsunami, described her experience to the Guardian,

“One of my younger brothers has a mental handicap and is totally dependent on us now. If Amma was around, there would have been no problem. Nor would I have had to stop my school to look after him. I cannot afford to miss classes, but my family is more important.”

Although just one example, this illustrates how it is young girls that suffer the most severe consequences of intergenerational disadvantage

Furthermore, due to socially ascribed gender roles, women, particularly in the Global South, are more often responsible for providing food and water for their families. In India, more than 84% of women are involved in agricultural activities. As a result, these women are more directly dependent on natural resources and hence disproportionately vulnerable to the aftermath of climate disasters. When disasters lead to resource scarcity, women have to work harder to provide.

Women’s nutrition can suffer as well. Describing drought conditions in India, farmer Sita Debi wrote,

“When there is no rain, we women have to work really hard in the fields to try and grow crops. Our nutrition also suffers because we are the last to eat at the family table.”

Women in Climate Disasters

Water insecurity after drought also hits women harder as they are often tasked with walking long distances to gather potable water. In areas of Kenya, fetching water may use up to 85% of a woman’s daily energy expenditure; in times of drought a greater workload is placed on women’s shoulders, some spending hours of a day in search of water.

Failure to meet expectations of domestic labour and the financial and mental stresses of post-disaster life also result in an observed increase in rates of domestic violence that is not isolated to the Global South. After the 2009 Australian bushfires, the percentage of women who lived in severely impacted areas who experienced violence was seven times that of women in areas that had been only peripherally burned. After Hurricane Katrina, studies found a ~98% increase in physical violence towards women. After the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, New Zealand saw a 40% rise in intimate partner violence in rural areas. Furthermore, after women’s shelters got flooded in the Lismore floods, women were forced to evacuate to areas where they were likely to come into contact with their perpetrators. Time and time again when disasters occur, domestic violence follows and women’s safety becomes less certain. Men become observably more violent and women are restricted in their capacity to escape.

As we continue to try to adapt and respond to climate disasters, we must remember that meaningful disaster resilience in both the Global North and South requires solutions that align with the interests and needs of women. Faced with the reality that climate disasters hit women harder in a multitude of ways, Feminist demands must be at the front and center of our struggle for climate justice.

Words by Eliza Crossley

The Long History of Iranian Female-led Resistance

Activists around the world look to the current resistance in Iran as a paragon of Feminist and female-run mobilisation. However, this neglects Iran’s storied history of Feminist organising, reaching back decades. With women alone at the helm of the ship of social change, their legacy informs the nature of Iranian Feminist resistance today.

The Constitutional Revolution

As the country’s independence was codified in 1906, the National Women’s Movement was involved, participating in constitutional struggles. This marked a historical precedent for female-led involvement in political affairs and mobilisation. Many women’s organisations were founded during this time and pushed for womens’ rights to be incorporated into the constitution, such as the right to vote. Although many women’s rights were ultimately disregarded, this period saw many key women’s groups formed, paving the path for Feminist organising for years to come.

The Women’s Press

Alongside mobilisation on the ground, Iranian women have frequently turned to the media to peddle Feminist narratives and empower themselves. In their book Women and Media in the Middle East, Gholam Khiabany and Annabelle Sreberny write, “[t]he women’s movement in Iran is like drizzle. You don’t feel it, but by the time you reach your destination, you are totally soaked.” This attests to women’s gradual infiltration into traditionally Patriarchal cultural bastions.

Women also constructed their own powerful independent institutions, such as Alam-e Neswan, which was founded in 1920. This magazine initially estranged itself from political pursuits, relegating women to discussing traditionally female domains such as cooking and fashion. However, its general tone reflected a drive towards female emancipation, which was accelerated by the creation of later

female-run political publications. Late 20th and early 21st century publications such as Zanan Monthly (Women Monthly) and Payam-e Hajar (Hajar’s message) significantly progress Iranian Feminist theory, which overlaps with but also differs from Western Feminist ideologies — Iranian Feminist narratives focus on causation patterns in gendered socialisation and politicisation.

The First Shah’s reforms

Under the first Shah in the 1930s-40s, women were given equal access to universities and schools, after significant grassroots push as part of the early Iranian Girls School Movement. However, and although women’s rights progressed significantly under the reign of the first Shah, many women were chagrined at the loss of the right to choose. The veil was abolished in the 1930s; many women remained at home to protest this decision.

The Second Shah’s reforms

According to Iranian journalist Haleh Esfandiari, although the second Shah is credited with significantly progressing women’s rights, his administration was quiet on women’s issues for the first twenty years of his reign. Rather than ascribing the nation’s progression with women’s rights to him, credit is due to longstanding Women’s Rights Organisations that lobbied the Shah.

I spoke to my Grandmother who lived under the second Shah’s Iran in the 1970s and 80s. She reminisced about her childhood where she felt her girlhood was unfettered. Apart from clear political influences, she hypothesised that female emancipation in society started in Iranian homes. Her father never treated her and her male siblings overtly differently, nor did he unduly restrict her freedoms. To her knowledge, many households functioned similarly. This cultural zeitgeist is reflective of decades of female-led resistance, trickling down generations.

Words by Ariana Haghighi

Abolition of the Monarchy

Scholarship surrounding the Islamic Revolution greatly credits the physical presence of women for expediting the abolition of the monarchy. Although conditions for women improved under the second Shah’s Iran, many women felt that the Pahlavi Regime promised more freedom and equality than it truly offered, and involved over-Westernisation of Iranian women. Women played an essential role in the Revolution, enshrined in symbols such as the warrior sister. Many women directly after the establishment of Khomeini’s regime were disillusioned by the stripback of women’s rights, but continued to lobby for choice.

Post-Revolution Campaigns

Recent mobilisation against compulsory hijab-wearing is not new — it is a new layer laid on a bedrock foundation of past movements. Immediately after the Islamic Republic was instated, women organised large demonstrations against the hijab mandate, which temporarily delayed the law. The campaign of My Stealthy Freedom against compulsory hijab laws in Iran has ballooned since 2014, proliferating on social media platforms. In 2017, women started a #whitewednesdays campaign, where they would post a photo of themselves wearing white and discarding headscarves in protest — this attracted the participation of women worldwide, including Saudi Arabian women who are also subject to a hijab mandate. Girls of Revolution Street involved women waving hijab fabric on Engelhab Street in Tehran in 2018.

After Iranian women effectively adopted and tailored the Western #MeToo movement to shine a spotlight on horrendous honor killings, Iran’s conservative parliament approved a rudimentary Bill that criminalises violence against women. However, many female lawyers in Iran recognise it falls short of international standards, and also that criminalisation may lead to further atrocities such as the death penalty.

Since the end of last year, the Iranian women’s movement has ballooned in exposure, gaining views in every corner of the world. As the West looks on and ponders intervention, we must recognise the power and strength of Iranian female-led resistance, respecting its history of effecting change.

Poetry Page!

“There was a suede pocket stitched inside your jacket

where held a folded off-white letter written,

“I fear you have begun upon a disagreeable path, which is not mine”

there was a stiff toughtness in your face

and your forehead seemed to sink as you left.”

- Unknown

“Oh baby, oh how I love you when your hair tastes of oil slicks and the way it sits so still through your paroxysms is simply so divine when you shake so slightly in the wind almost imperceptibly but for your wrested fingers twitching with the smell of ink.”

- Unknown

by a host of foolish characters

Thin tubes of PVC grow from your bones

the adhesive film on the lid of an orange juice cup

rears upward in the dull light of a room with curtained walls

metronomes tearing your eyes from the inside of your head,

the indent of the biting Nylon straps on your skin

will fade with time.

“They declared me unfit to live,

said into that great void my soul’d be hurled

They wanted to know why I did what I did

Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”

- Virginia Woolf

There are always great things that we plan for that we never get to do.

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Designs by Jacqui Adams

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Growing Strong Resources

For Survivors and Sexual Health

ACON | (02) 9206 2000 | LGBTQI+ health organisation offering information, referrals, counselling, advocacy and practical support for LGBTI people in NSW experiencing domestic and family violence.

LegalAid NSW | 1300 888 259 | Provides means-tested legal support over the phone.

Link2Home | 1800 152 152 | Information and referral telephone service run by the NSW government for people experiencing housing instability.

NSW Health Sexual Assault Services | List of 54 other sexual assault clinics across NSW for people not around Camperdown. All open 24/7. It can be found online.

NSW Rape Crisis Centre | 1800 424 017 | Free hotline available 24/7 run by experienced professionals who can provide support, counselling and referrals to other services. They also provide counselling online.

Full Stop Australia | Provides 24/7 telephone and online crisis counselling for anyone in Australia who has experienced or is at risk of sexual assault, family or domestic violence and their non offending supporters. Has a free telephone interpreting service available upon request.

Sexual Assault Clinic at RPA Hospital | (02) 9515 9040 | Provides face-to-face and telephone counselling services, as well as medical services such as forensic kits and STI testing. These services are offered to outpatients.

The Gender Centre | (02) 9569 2366 | Provides services such as counselling, accommodation, outreach, and support for trans and gender diverse people in NSW.

Twenty10 | (02) 8594 9555 | Provides housing services, legal support, and health clinics for young LGBTIQ+ people, and counselling and referrals for LGBTIQ+ people of all ages.

Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Service | 1800 686 587 | Provides legal advice and support for a range of issues, including domestic, sexual, and family violence, to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, children, and youth.

Safer Communities Confidential Helpline | (02) 8627 6808

Women’s Legal Advice Line: 1800 801 501

Domestic Violence Legal Advice Line: 1800 810 784

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- Directory of Practitioners and Specialists compiled by WoCo members

- USyd Reporting Module, for reporting instances of sexual assault to the university

- Zines on Consent

29

How to Respond to a Disclosure of Sexual Assault

How you respond to a disclosure of sexual assault can influence someone’s healing process and have a serious impact. Being informed on how to respond in such a situation can be very helpful for those who have experienced sexual assault in navigating their trauma.

A response that is validating, non-blaming, and compassionate goes a long way in reassuring someone. You are in a very careful situation when someone entrusts such a traumatic experience to you. Below are some examples of important things to do and say to someone who tells you they have been sexually assaulted.

Three Key Things to Say:

“I believe you”

‘This is not your fault”

“You are not alone”

Additional Considerations:

- Ask the person what they want you to do.

- Don’t judge if they choose not to take the action you think best. It must be their decision.

- Consider whether to document what they’ve said. Ask if it’s okay for you to do so. If you get the go ahead, think about how and where you will store it to keep their privacy.

- Some jobs require you to report disclosures of sexual, domestic and family violence. Find out your state’s mandatory reporting guidelines.

- Remember, the decision about what to do is always with the person who has experienced violence or abuse.

Initial Response:

Do:

- Listen to their story

- Let them express how they feel

- Let them cry

- Encourage them

- Explain what you can do

- Ask them what they want to do

If the Sexual Assault was Recent

- Consider options for preserving forensic evidence.

- Help the person to access counselling and medical services

Dont:

It’s important to remember the person needs:

- A compassionate response where they are heard and believed

- To have control over the process as far as possible

- Not to have to repeat their story to multiple people

- Transparency around the processes that will be followed when they disclose it

- Information about whether their disclosure will be kept confidential

If this isn’t possible, information about who it will be shared with and for what purpose.

- Tell them what to do and ‘take over’

- Ask ‘why’ questions like “why don’t you leave”

- Get angry on their behalf

- Assume you know how they feel

- Dismiss them if their story confuses you

*The information provided is from Full Stop Australia. Go to the Resources Directory for information on accessing trauma specialist councillors.