Zonta address by Mrs Margaret Whitlam

ZONTA CLUB OF ADELAIDE SYMPOSIUM THE REALITIES OF EQUALITY OF THE AUSTRALIAN SCENE IN INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S YEAR THROUGH MRS. MARGARET WHITLAM'S EYES, ADELAIDE..:, 19. APRIL. 1975...

SOCIAL ASPECTS All of us here today are convinced that we are - or should be - equal persons with men. We cannot, and would not, mostly, be identical but Who am I to speak? Is my view different from yours? Is it better? Is it worse? Is it jaundiced - and is it real?

Mine is no academic aspect. There is no philosophy which describes my own personal feelings or my own feelings of inadequacy, true, I do look on rather than in.

You probably envy me. You say to yourselves - there she goes with nothing to worry her and nothing much to do.

It's not true you know. This exalted position brings little magic. There is no section in it to provide for utter equality sometimes I feel there's none to provide for reality.

I suppose I'm Mrs. Everybody really. It has been said that speakers with a positive approach to the aims of I.W.Y. can offer a service to the community. I do have a background of social work and I do have contact with people of all walks of life.

ZONTA is already as old as I internationally but only a little older than my grandson nationally.

Other speakers will have already given or are planning to give you the lowdown on the sexual, political and legal aspects of the question before us.

I can only speak here as a member of the National Advisory Committee for International Women's Year - that Committee which is happily able to prevent saggy services from collapsing, to initiate others believed to be of wide benefit and to assist people who can't or won't promote themselves.

Social change refers to the modifications in the social relations among members of a self perpetuating group having distinctive institutions and culture. You will agree that our society does indeed have distinctive institutions, though not enough, and culture however it is formed.

Since 1975 was proclaimed I.W.Y. by the United Nations the early formation of an N.A.C. on the Australian Scene got us going well before most countries. Some of which are still asking themselves, "What should we do?" - if anything. "Who should pay?" and "Is it worthwhile?"

You must agree the $2 million start given by the Australian Government was a great help in our country. How is it being used? Who is eligible for help? Why? Our problem, the problem of women, is a problem without a name. Yet it can be described.

We do not exist as people in our own right. We are often missing from history; our language virtually ignores us; our names are not our own; our lives are lived through others, we are someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother; our role in life is largely determine us. Our God i s mÂŹasculine; our laws are made by men; we are attacked by men, defended by other men; even our bodies are not our own, and if we think at all we are said to be men.

And what is the solution?

We must write our history, reform our language, keep our own names, live our own lives, redefine our God, make our own laws, learn to defend ourselves, demand and get control of our bodies, and affirm that it is feminine to think.

We lack faith in ourselves.

The individual needs the courage to admit that it is lacking and the strength to act as if it were not; for the group it will come with' unity.

We are not yet united.

To achieve unity we need to admit the similarity of our problems and the difficulties that confront us. But we like to think that we have, either by good fortune or superior skills,

3. overcome our particular difficulties and that our corporate ones no longer exist. We like to think that we are already free and that all that is required of us is compassion for those women who are not. This is an illusion.

We should take a closer look at the condition of our lives.

Although the work ahead of us will not be easy it will be a great adventure; we will be creating a female culture and we hope a more human world.

We can compare all women to the immigrant - the member of a minority. She, the immigrant, is a stranger in a strange land; if she cannot communicate with the people there because she does not speak their language and they do not speak hers she feels herself an alien and she retreats into the privacy of her own inner world. She withdraws from meaningful contact with the larger world which to her is hostile and she meets it, when she must, with hostility and suspicion.

Because she is afraid and because, if she wanted to, she could not communicate her fears, her hostility turns to bitterness, her confidence is gradually destroyed and with it her actual capacity to learn the new skill which she so badly needs. The woman who comes suddenly into a strange society which she cannot reach experiences culture shock and so long as she cannot contact and understand it and her place in it, she will react in this predictably human way.

How is the woman who has always been "at home" in Australia unlike the immigrant women? She does, of course, speak the language; if she experiences culture shock, if she is isolated from the life of the community, the reason must be different, but the experience is the same. All of us experience culture shock of this kind. We are confronted daily and from our earliest years with implicit and explicit denigration of women, denial of our value as people, and limitation of our right to choose. In retreating from an experience which is painful in refusing to challenge the elements in our environment which are hostile to us, we have failed to recognise that we are not at home in our masculine society.

We can no longer retreat; none of us wish to find fault where none exists but these hostile elements must be challenged.

Our history, literature, language and art are good places to begin.

History has been largely silent on the work of women but a picture is now emerging which shows that we too have been innovators and creators. We have made significant contributions to medicine and to agriculture. The sciences and the arts.

Even within the established masculine hierarchy there were women of power and influence. We now see that our history, which has still for the most part to be written, is as significant

as the history we have been taught and are beginning to realise the extent of our loss.

We appear more often in literature but there are few descriptions of strong and effective women. For the most part we are shown as dependent, weak, unthinking, uncreative and often immoral. We are not only described in this way we are advised to emulate these models. The few strong images that do exist are presented to us as images of abnormal women.

To admire them is to admit that we too are abnormal; we must deny either our aspirations or our nature.

The present media have not neglected us, on the contrary, all our most vivid images of women are from this source but these are images of bodies rather than of women.

If we turn to our language we find we are quite simply ignored. We are taught to use man and men when we mean person and people and to use he, him and his when we are the abstract human being referred to in this way. If you see a sign that says, "Men at work", you do not expect to see' women working.

We work man hours, we are female aldermen and chairmen yet we must assume that all chairmen are male.

Traditionally, feminine art has been called "fancy work" and "craft" - it has been undervalued.

The result of these influences and our past reaction to them is that we are isolated. From ourselves, from other women, and from the main stream of our culture. This result only reinforces the effects of past domestic confinement.

We have in the past welcomed seclusion because of the fear of violence outside the home but we are still threatened with rape and with the public disgrace that generally goes with it.

We are still subject to insults in the streets and to the common danger of assault which we share with men.

We are beginning to realise that our protective isolation makes us even more vulnerable; it is ironic that women are subject to violence even in their own homes.

When women began to look outside their homes usually because they needed paid employment, they became less isolated. Working women still bear the ill effects of a social change which has benefited others. They are expected very often to assume responsibility for both the work at home and paid work but they

5; do have a valuable contact with other women and greater independence. We should pool our resources and work together in groups and in committees such as yours to help them gain the same benefits from the social change which they have pioneered.

What is to be done? There is a great deal the individual can do. We cannot all write our own history but we can read the history that other women are now writing. We can reform our language, there are acceptable alternatives already in the language to the words we will reject. We can take a critical view of our difficulties which often become merely problems to be solved when we do so.

Working together we can examine and correct our laws, combat violence and assist those women who are victims of it by providing shelter and support. We can supply health care where we often now have only treatment and the child care, educational and training facilities that we need.

I am very happy indeed to be speaking to a group of people who recognise the need for common action, and I am sure you must share my pleasure in knowing that all over Australia women are working together for the success of the year for women.

My committee has been able to help so many causes. The categories into which aid falls concern general community attitudes, health and welfare, education, work and creativity.

South Australia specifically is benefitting fairly extensively. There have already been two series of grants announced and you will find that the Department of Adult Educatio n at Adelaide University was granted $4,000 as was the Women's Centre in Adelaide in that first burst.

The University of Adelaide asked to hold weekly seminars involving 8 - 10 project groups which were to study various aspects of women's status and their role and proposed a published report or a program for university station 5UV. The funds were required for co-ordinators acting as tutors and for publication costs.

Then, too, the Royal South Australian Society of Arts Inc., asked for and was granted $3,850 for an exhibition on

the theme of "Art and the Creative Women" - to be held from 12 April to 2 May. Have you seen it?

The Adelaide Festival Centre Trust was granted $1,000 for a multimedia production about women to be included in the Centre's "Theatre in Education" programme to visit schools throughout South Australia during this year.

The Women's Centre in Adelaide, whether you need it or not, is very much a contact point for women, a resource centre beginning to be widely used by the community and a referral centre to welfare agencies. Funds were required for essential improvements to the Centre.

The Institute of Criminology has just had the first of two seminars which involve the payment of expenses for delegates from all over Australia. The study, "Women as Victims of Crime", has been considered in Canberra this week.

"Participation of Women in the Criminal Justice System" will be held with similar support in June.

The funding of a national delegate to the international conference of Parents Without Partners will surely help the single parent in South Australia as in all other States.

And that was just for starters.

The Darwin disaster occurred just as we were off the ground.

The needs of women there, as expressed by them, were met quickly by the N.A.C. You may think sunglasses and underwear extra unnecessary articles. When all you have is what you stand up in - and you can't see straight - those are essentials.

The 2,000 women who remained behind needed creams against the sun, needed frequent clothing changes in the face of a lack of laundry facilities.

How did you fare in the second set of grants? You'll benefit from the books being published all around - like Anne Conlon and Edna Ryan in N.S.W. writing about, the Gentle Invaders - Australian Women at Work 1788-1974, on women's participation in the labor force since Australia was founded. The book describes the arbitration system and gives the background of wage fixation in Australia with particular reference to women.

There will be at least two very important national conferences to be held in Australia later this year. The first, on the theme of women and health - an issue which directly affects every woman and girl in our society. The second will be on

the theme of women and politics. This conference will be open to all women, women's groups, all political parties and any other interested organisations. The intention is not only to discuss past and present participation by women in political activities but also to bring about a greater understanding of the means by which women can take part in the making of political decisions and the difficulties that will confront them in so doing.

As a nation we have contributed $40,000 towards the United Nations voluntary fund for I.W.Y. This will enable the U.N. to carry out its own activities during the year which include a world conference on the theme of Equality, Development and peace, to be held in Mexico in June 1975 and an inter-regional conference on The Communication of Attitudes : Women, The Arts and The Media to be held in Australia in November 1975 and the publication of a wide range of material relating to the year.

The Consultative Committee for the world conference of I.W.Y. set up a draft international plan of action in New York some weeks ago.

It is recognised in this plan that in the total development process the role of women, along with men, needs to be considered in terms of their contribution to the family as well as to society and the national economy. Higher status for this role in the home - as a parent, spouse and homemaker - can only enhance the personal dignity of a man and a woman.

Household activities have generally been perceived as having a low economic and social prestige.

The resurgence of women's movements in the past decade in many countries means that many women have become more conscious of their own lack of options and aware of instances of subtle, as well as overt, discrimination practised in long established social institutions such as the family, school and university, the work place, the law courts and the mass communications media (radio, newspapers and television).

The plan stresses the need for commitment on the part of governments and the international community to accord importance and, priority to measures to improve the situation of women both as a means of achieving the goals of social progress and development and as an end in itself.

Have previous generations offered anything better than the present? I think not. Is the present situation satisfactory?

I think not. Just recently I was asked to write a foreword to a city's gazette acknowledging contributions women have made to that community. I wrote :-

8.

This year, more than ever before, I am convinced that if you took away the women of our community you would lose a lot of organisations altogether.

I don't mean that there must be a matching of male and female in quantitative terms - simply that so many service associations depend on the very qualities of purpose, tenacity and endurance found in homebodies as well as career girls and committee women.

In the past I have been a part of this community and have had firsthand experience of, so many women's groups - in the schools and churches, with Red Cross, Girl Guides and the C.W.A., with the R.S.L. auxiliaries and with sporting and cultural bodies promoting swimming, athletics, bowls, migrants, marching girls, music, adult education, art, physical culture, golf, tennis and ballet.

It will be good to see credit given to this dedicated hardworking band of women, surely one of the many purposes of the declaration of International Women's Year.

Too many people see 1975 as an extension of women's liberation or as an opportunity to get something for nothing (which is usually what it's worth). For me it is very much a time to take stock, to show off a little with what we have achieved and to augment the rest whenever possible.

As a member of the National Advisory Committee for I.W.Y r it is possible to see some of the power being put into the work of women. It is to be hoped that you, too, can see it and that those who come after us will never underestimate it.

As I meant to ask in the beginning - how equal do I feel?

"I" meaning you. How much easier it is to list the ways in which anyone feels unequal.

The bravest woman in our land is probably Elizabeth Reid now that Germaine Greer has left us to it. I'm not terribly taken with her title - "Personal Adviser to the Prime Minister on Women's Issues".

Who is his adviser on men's issues? How many male advisers are there?

It's a weighted battle but at least we're in it.

This

is the reality of our life.