Tag Archives: Women

Was the blokes’ republic a turn-off for women?

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Did more women than men vote no to the republic – and if so, why?

Polling before the referendum showed several divides: yes voters were more likely to be younger than older, Labor than Liberal, urban than rural and well-off rather than struggling.

But one of the most consistent divides was around gender, with polls reporting that the number of women supporting the republic plan lagged about 10 percentage points behind men.

The Labor Party president, Mr Barry Jones, says election results suggest that women generally put a higher premium than men on the concept of security, “that is, hanging on to the known”.

Women also tend to be less attracted than men to themes of separation, independence and self-reliance, according to the historian Professor Marilyn Lake.

This might translate into less enthusiasm for “cutting the apron strings” from the mother country.

Social researcher Mr Hugh Mackay says he would have accepted that explanation 30 years ago but today’s women are much more independent. He believes the predicted gender gap was the result of more women than men resenting the way the referendum process was handled.

“One of the standard things said about gender difference is that men are more interested in outcomes, and women are more interested in process,” he says. “(It’s) an analogy for sexual foreplay, in a way: the male just wants to get on with it, and the female wants to be romanced and gentled into it.

“The (referendum) process was so rushed that there was a sense of being hustled along, and I think women intuitively felt the process wasn’t getting the proper attention, that we jumped straight to one model with no real public debate.

“It was men who were typically saying, `It may not be the model you want but nothing’s perfect. Let’s just do it’.”

Mr Mackay says women are also more likely than men to favor Mr John Howard as preferred Prime Minister, and therefore his stand.

Former Victorian Labor Premier Joan Kirner agrees that “blokes like just to get on with the decision” but says: “The research we have done for Emily’s List on elections indicates that women are far more likely to make a positive decision around issues that affect what the pollsters call `the details of their lives’.

“If matters don’t affect the details of their lives – and they don’t regard the republic as doing that – they will either be dismissive or vote against it.”

The deputy leader of the Victorian Opposition, Ms Louise Asher, suspects that the pressure of women’s lives militated against their positive involvement: “Most are incredibly busy trying to juggle triple roles. In the end, this was not going to impact on their economic wellbeing, it wasn’t going to buy them more time, and I don’t think anyone in Australia – putting aside the question of the monarchy – thinks the current system is actually disadvantageous.”

But there is evidence that women do care about Australia’s future identity. Says Mrs Kirner, “When I did consultations around Australia for the centenary of federation report for Keating in 1994, we had droves of women coming up to talk to us about the kind of Australia they wanted to see, their desire for reconciliation between black and white, and their pride in the country.

“It’s not that they are not interested in these issues as such, but they have got to be reflected in people-type terms.”

Mrs Kirner is critical of the Sydney-dominated yes campaign for failing to take ordinary women with it: “I said to the republican movement five years ago that … we needed to have community consultations with women, but it wasn’t the Sydney style. They had lunches and dinners, more formal functions rather than a community process.”

She suspects women were also alienated by the campaign’s blokiness. “If we had got more people like Hazel Hawke and Nova Peris-Kneebone out on the ground as part of a proper deliberative process, we would have done better.

“The last two weeks of the campaign was almost entirely dominated on the republican side by the faces of men. I thought if I saw another face of a bloke over 50 I would scream.

“When the coup de grace was supposed to be Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam saying `It’s time’, I could just see women in the kitchen saying, `Yeah, it’s time to get the bloody dinner’!”

Rather more mortifying for women is the possibility that any gap could be explained by their greater political ignorance. Dr Pamela Ryan, managing director of Issues Deliberation Australia, oversaw a “people’s constitutional convention” in which 380 voters debated the issues with leaders of both sides of the republic debate.

She says that among the voters, “Women had lower levels of political knowledge than men, and that can often motivate a no vote.”

At the start of the debate only 33 per cent of the women, compared with 47 per cent of the men, knew that the role of the proposed president was like that of the current Governor-General. Ten per cent of women (22 per cent of men) had known that the prime minister could remove the president with the approval of the House of Representatives.

But here’s the rub: in this group, that ignorance did not translate into a marked gender gap, with support for the yes vote at the beginning of the debate running at 50 per cent for men and 48 per cent for women.

First published in The Age.

Young women now hit `The Wall’ later – and it shocks them

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SOMETIMES I’m invited into private schools to talk to girls about women in the workforce. The audiences of 14 and 15-year-olds have no experience of what it’s like out there, but they do have a strong sense that the world will be their oyster. Their teachers tell them that if they work hard, they will do well. Employers come to their schools and brag about how many women they now have in their company and how they’re looking for more.These girls grow up thinking that their world is different to their mothers’, and that bright young women can take their rightful place in it. They’re the kind of girls who grow into Dr Fiona Stewart’s disillusioned Generation X’ers.

Talking to them about how rough it still can be for women is like trying to talk to first-time pregnant mothers about parenting. The mothers are preoccupied with the present and can’t think past the birth. They don’t want to hear about how tough the early months of mothering can be. They’re anxious enough as it is. The girls are similarly resistant to taking in unpleasant facts. They need to believe that it will be all right.

Gen-X women with high expectations, according to Stewart, often end up blaming feminism for disappointment in adult life when they find it impossible to “have it all”: when the professional race is exhausting, when they can’t do the superwoman job-and-babies number, or when their relationships have caved in or never kicked off because they concentrated too fiercely on career achievement.

Stewart rightly points out that these disappointments are not failures of feminism but failures of society to accommodate the way feminism has raised women’s expectations. In some cases, personal problems might be a contributing factor too. Stewart’s findings might not apply to young women overall because she did not interview a large random sample. And she recruited her subjects through advertisements, so it is possible that dissatisfied young women were more likely to respond and therefore skewed the results. On the other hand, maybe she’s struck something here. Maybe young women are angry at older women for having somehow let them down.Either way, this debate is not about a generational divide.

Stewart’s findings are more likely to be the result of a generational change in the age at which educated women become politicised about “the feminine condition”. As individuals, women tend not to become feminists until they have hit “The Wall”. For older feminists this happened much earlier in life. In their 20s they were told that they couldn’t work or study and also be mothers. Those in the public service lost their jobs if they married. Women were paid less than men for the same work and many jobs were assumed to be closed to them altogether.The Wall was clearly visible.

Today young women are encouraged at school, nurtured at university, and welcomed into junior ranks of the professional workforce. The wall has moved, and they don’t see what’s left of it until they hit it in their 30s.

This is the age at which they discover that they cannot give their children what they need and work crazy hours climbing the corporate ladder; that the employers who were happy to encourage them in the role of handmaiden are reluctant to share real power with them; that the notion of genuinely equal pay is still just a notion.And if Stewart is right, they then blame older women, rather than a recalcitrant system, for their troubles. Stewart has reported that one young woman who found she could not do the career and the baby simultaneously blamed “bloody feminist rhetoric” for her disappointment. Where did she get her feminism? Out of a Weeties packet?
No one ever told me I could have it all; maybe that’s a side-effect of a working-class upbringing. This is, after all, a largely middle-class debate among privileged Anglo women. Can’t complete the PhD and get up six times a night to the baby? Tell that to the migrant mothers for whom economic restructuring has meant long shifts worked at short notice for employers maximising the new workplace “flexibility”. Or to the unemployed public-housing mums who have to water down milk for the kids. Or to battered women too scared to leave the men who provide for their children. They are women who really do have little power over their own lives. The women Stewart interviewed have much more freedom, and for some of them to say choice is “the mustard gas of their generation” is nauseating.

Choice always involves a path foregone as well as a path followed, and it involves some grief. Negotiating that is one of the tasks of midlife.

Former sex discrimination commissioner Quentin Bryce is one of many older feminists who have been quite sympathetic to younger women. “I often find myself telling ambitious thirty-somethings that they can’t hold down a full-time, demanding, professional role, have a second child and finish the MBA this year … You can have it all, but you can’t have it all at the same time.”

That’s what the next generation of schoolgirls needs to hear, too. As well as being instilled with confidence that they can succeed, they need to understand about glass ceilings and blokey workplace dynamics; about the struggle to balance work and family; about how, historically, women’s progress has always stalled under pitiless economic conditions and governments that support markets rather than people. If young women are to be resilient, they must be alerted to The Wall. Suggestions on how to get that message past the optimism of youth are welcome.

First published in The Sunday Age.

The politician, the victim and the sisterhood

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CARMEN Lawrence, who grew up Catholic, would know about mortal sins. Her generation of parish-school children was taught that they were the worst sins, so grave that they killed off the grace in your soul until you repented.

Catholics have softened their line on what constitutes a mortal sin in the years since then. Have feminists?

Lawrence has been acquitted of charges that she knowingly gave false evidence to the Marks Royal Commission about the Easton petition. Her defence was that she could not remember being told of its details before it was tabled in the Western Australian Parliament.

The petition contained misleading allegations by businessman Brian Easton about his estranged wife, Penny, and the then Opposition Leader, Richard Court. Four days after it was tabled, Penny Easton killed herself.

Lawrence, at her trial, conceded that the petition might have been discussed with her before its tabling, although she could remember no such event. She acknowledged that she could not say firmly one way or the other, given that she had no memory of the meetings at which the petition was allegedly discussed.

The jury accepted that she was not guilty of lying, but her line of defence leaves open questions about the train of events in Perth in 1992. For feminists, they pose a particular dilemma.

The picture painted in her colleagues’ testimony is of a politician who committed the cardinal sins of the feminist catechism. To use a petition full of false claims to bolster one’s political position would be to abuse institutional power.

In this case, the person on whom events rebounded – the suicidal Penny Easton – was an icon of feminist victimhood: a fragile woman persecuted by a vindictive ex-husband who managed to harness the full weight of the patriarchy to his cause.

Where does all this leave the sisterhood?

Many women admired Lawrence’s personal style: intelligent, dignified, direct, seemingly focused more on policies than personalities. She showed up the aggro strutting of pigeon-chested pollies and personified the hoped-for feminisation of politics, its transformation from a Boys’ Own blood sport to a calling that could be respected.

Lawrence’s public image dovetailed with the idea that the purpose of getting women into the system is to change the way the system works. But if high-profile feminists defend those of their own who do not play the game so differently from the “boys”, does this mean they see it as more important for trailblazers to succeed in the system than to transform it?

Early Australian feminists never doubted that women should use their political power differently to men. Marilyn Lake, professor of history at La Trobe University, tells of suffragist Rose Scott, who believed that the women’s franchise would infuse public life with kindness. (“Yeah duh-uh,” Bart Simpson would say to that idea, but Bart always has had a wobbly moral compass.)

In her coming book, Getting Equal: The History of Feminism in Australia, Lake writes that Rose Scott deeply mistrusted traditional politics as full of selfishness, combativeness, greed and pomposity, but she knew that women had to enter political life in order to change the world. Her solution: women should avoid party politics.

Fellow activist Vida Goldstein agreed, arguing in 1903 that if women joined existing parties, they would have to “adopt men’s methods and men’s aims and simply help in perpetuating the old order of things”.

Today, institutional feminists too often analyse political power as just another right denied to women, just another career path barricaded. They criticise the unfairness of expecting a higher moral standard of women politicians, arguing that it turns them into “God’s police” and makes it harder for them to survive their inevitable mistakes.

The double standard does, indeed, suck.

Women do have to work much harder to succeed, and they are hounded longer and louder and more viciously when they fail. They are being sent into the piranha pit of politics but are forbidden to use the usual tactics to survive.

It shouldn’t be like that, but the fact is that it doesn’t let them off the hook with regard to their own choices. It doesn’t justify their losing sight of the reason they are there, which is to make a difference.

The standards are justifiably higher for feminist politicians, as opposed to women politicians generally, because they espouse a particular ethical stance with regard to the use of power. The rhetoric of feminism is empty if those who choose to wear the label do not uphold its ideals.

It’s not so old-fashioned a notion. That other child of the iconic post-modern family, Lisa Simpson, is every bit as much an idealist as Rose Scott. Simpson would no doubt argue that if politicians let the system determine their behavior, their behavior would never end up changing the system. She’s that kind of girl. Maybe she has no future in politics.

First published in The Age.

Obey? Sophie, how could you!

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SHE doesn’t expect anyone to believe she means it, of course. That’s because she doesn’t mean it herself. When Sophie Rhys-Jones vows to “obey” Prince Edward tomorrow, she doesn’t mean that she will do what he says.

She patiently explained to a TV interviewer this week, tying herself in Jesuitical knots, that obeying one’s husband does not mean doing exactly what one is told. When she says “obey”, what she really means is “trust”. Thus, she will “trust” Edward to make all the important decisions affecting their life together.

Come off the grass, girlie.

Is this the supposedly savvy career girl? It could well be her royal mutation. Rumor has it that Prince Philip, jack of tempestuous young women who don’t know their place, insisted the word be reinstated in the royal marriage service (the 19-year-old Diana had enough spirit to refuse to say it at hers).

Perhaps Sophie is making a strategic decision to keep the old duke happy for the sake of a harmonious future in the “family firm” (if it’s not an oxymoron to pair the idea of family harmony with the Windsors).

Perhaps it is her way of showing that she’s going to be a good girl, a nice princess, not a troublemaker like Diana or Fergie. Perhaps she needs the biddable, demure front even more now that her naked breast has appeared below her laughing face in a London tabloid.

On the other hand, maybe she’s gormless enough to actually want to say it. Maybe under all that apparent self-assurance there’s just another lost little girl looking for a daddy to whom she can hand over responsibility for her life; a passive princess. Maybe she’s found another little boy who thinks manliness is about dominance and privilege. There’s a lot of it about.

In a marriage of commoners, it would be a private matter for the couple. But the Windsors are a dynasty. Monarchists tell us the royal family is important not so much for its component parts, which have proved regrettably flawed, but for its symbolism. It is supposed to embody, on our behalf, deeply held values.

It does, and some of them are very ugly indeed. The notion that hereditary privilege should be protected and maintained no matter the cost to the individual is one.

Years ago, long before Diana died, it was reported that Charles’ mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, had helped choose Diana to be the royal brood mare. Diana’s youth and seeming shyness made her the perfect candidate for a marriage in which she was to be a dupe. Her personal happiness was secondary to the need to ensure the succession. The fact that she would live a life of privilege was presumed to make the Faustian arrangement a fair trade.

My husband looked up from reading that report and said: “The last ritual sacrifice of a virgin was Lady Diana Spencer on the altar of St Paul’s Cathedral.”

Sophie is not Diana. She is older and shrewder; she’s been around. Perhaps she’ll say “obey” and give them merry hell anyway (one can only hope).

But the Windsors’ attitude to marriage is a metaphor for their attitude to the world. They remain steeped in the notion that respect is not something to be earned but something to which one is born (or not born, in Sophie’s case). They actually seem to believe that the genetic accidents of “nobility” and maleness endow the right to call the shots in other people’s lives.

True nobility – nobleness of mind or character, as opposed to mere social class – might justify such a prerogative, although true nobility would also bring a disinclination to use it. A genuinely noble person would recognise others’ rights, respect their autonomy, and understand that one person’s social standing and material wellbeing should not be based on the subjection or disadvantage of others.

Of course, it’s not in the royals’ interests to do that, and even the one who chooses to call himself plain old Edward Windsor still goes along with the hierarchical games when it suits him. But any man who wants his wife to kowtow to him in front of the whole world fails a modern test of princeliness.

It’s not in our interests to indulge the Windsors’ time-warp fantasies. It’s been a long time since the British royal family stood for anything with which a more sophisticated, egalitarian, multicultural Australia could identify; when Sophie says “obey” tomorrow, it will just be another reminder of that.

Let’s hope any resulting public distaste helps to ensure that our republic referendum does not end in Australia making a Sophie’s choice.

First published in The Age.

When health-care is a hazard

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Up to 16 per cent of women have experienced sexual harassment from doctors and 3 per cent report having been sexually assaulted in the consulting room, according to a new survey of 472 Melbourne women.

Women who had a negative or abusive experience with a doctor rarely took action because of fear, shame and self-doubt, including anxiety that they would not be believed, the study found.

The research project, Towards Women-Sensitive Medical Practice, was conducted by Victoria University and Women’s Health West. A researcher and senior lecturer in psychology at Victoria University, Ms Heather Gridley, said the study originally set out to examine broader aspects of relationships between doctors and women patients but delved into sexual misconduct after women raised the issue.

Five-and-a-half per cent of women reported having been “sexually harassed” but this rate increased when they were asked about specific experiences that constitute harassment: 14 per cent believed they had been asked to undress unnecessarily and 16 per cent said they had been “touched intimately” when it was not medically required.

Overseas-born women were more likely to say they had been molested.

Ms Gridley says the higher rate for migrant women could be related to their more restricted choice of doctor due to language barriers. Women’s immediate responses to being molested varied. One said, “I’m normally assertive but I couldn’t say anything; I just walked out.” Others reported, “I cried all night and thought, `What have I done?’ But it wasn’t me.”

The long-term consequences of inappropriate or abusive encounters with doctors included impairment of subsequent relationships with health professionals, which had implications for the women’s health, and ongoing psychological distress, the report found. Many women felt grief and anger in regard to the loss of trust in the doctor/authority figure. But, while some women later tried to avoid doctors, many reported positive experiences with subsequent GPs.

The report said there was a need for improved medical education and increased sanctions against offending doctors as well as education for women about what they have a right to expect when they undergo intimate examinations.

Ms Gridley says it would be an overreaction for male doctors to feel that the abuse phenomenon means they should never see a woman without a chaperone. “Most women can actually tell the difference between a clinical examination and something creepy. ”

Ms Gridley says the medical profession is “no better or worse than other professions with the same opportunities. But they should also not deny that it happens. They need to take (the prevalence of abuse) on board in the same way the churches and schools have had to take it on board. The professionals are the next ones and the sooner they do it, the better”.

Dr George Segal, the Victorian president of the Australian Medical Association, says the profession takes the issue of sexual misconduct very seriously: “It’s totally inappropriate for a patient to be harassed sexually or in any other way during a consultation.”
But there are many patients with psychological problems whose perceptions of what happened might not always fit with the reality, he says.

* SATURDAY EXTRA: Sex in the forbidden zone
CASE STUDIES

* “Melinda’s” doctor fondled her breast. “He was supposedly doing a chest examination at the time. I think I was probably absolutely stunned and … I can remember having a really high temperature and I was just dizzy and I thought, `I can’t deal with any of this …’.” The doctor later visited her at home uninvited and made constant phone calls to her workplace.

* “Carole” went to see a doctor for pelvic inflammatory disease. The doctor examined her rectally; she protested and he stopped. After a few days of antibiotic treatment she felt no better and returned to him. He examined her and then lay on top of her. She said, “Get off this minute.”

* “Lee” said: “I know some (ethnic) girls who were actually raped. They kept the miserable situation to themselves; they could only whisper it to close friends for comfort. They dared not contact authorities for fear that their names would be released to the media. (Their) culture made them believe that they were to be blamed.”

* “Elaine” said: “When I found out that I was pregnant, I came to a doctor for confirmation. He asked me to undress and lie on the couch, explaining that I needed an internal check-up to make sure everything was all right for me. But for about 15 minutes he let me lie naked like that without touching me. He just watched me from about one metre away. I got impatient, asking him, `What are you doing to me?’ Then he told me that he changed his mind; I didn’t need an internal check-up any more.”

* “Sarah” said: “A male doctor examined me internally with both his hands inside me. Not only was it extremely painful but his method … seemed very awkward compared to my previous experience of internal examinations. He took a lot longer than I expected … I felt angry and wanted him to stop, as he seemed to be morbidly enjoying this. After it was over I wanted to tell him off but couldn’t due to my difficulties with the language. I shared my experience with other women whom I knew had been to see the same doctor. They had similar experiences.”

First published in The Age.

Life on the other side of the wall

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Brigid was a legend. She lived in an institution for people with intellectual disability. Staff called her “the devil’s child”; some claimed that a scar on her stomach marked where Satan had entered her. In fact, she was their baby, not the devil’s.

Brigid, 26, had Downs syndrome and had been institutionalised since birth. As an adult she shared a locked unit with 20 other women who had what are euphemistically called “challenging behaviors”.

Brigid’s “challenges” included smearing and throwing faeces, stripping off her clothes and hitting and biting other inmates and staff. She was as brutal to herself as she was to others; she headbanged violently, throwing herself backwards into the wall or forwards on to tables or the floor, and punched and slapped herself.

In an effort to control her biting, authorities had removed her front teeth. Many of the women with whom she lived also had been subjected to this discipline-by-dentistry. It was one of the first things researcher Dr Kelley Johnson noticed about them.

Johnson, a senior lecturer in human services at Deakin University, spent hundreds of hours working in the locked unit in the early 1990s as part of a research project. She wanted to study why people were still kept in large institutions such as this and whether the push for greater rights for people with disabilities had forced such places to change.

Johnson has written about that time in Deinstitutionalising Women, in which she explores the lives of the 21 women in the unit and the way the institution dealt with them in society’s name. (To protect the women’s privacy, she has given them false names and renamed the institution “Hilltop”.)
Her first impressions were of a large room in which the women milled about, aimlessly, all day: “There was no furniture. The noise hit me, a wall of sound … One woman was standing in the centre of the room screaming … Others were shouting. The television was going. Some women walked around the room. Others sat on the floor. Some were undressed. One was naked … I was instantly surrounded by women who wanted to touch me or put their arms around me.”

Then there was “the smell of 27 women living and working in two rooms”. “It was the smell of food distributed in a closed space. It was the underlying smell of urine and faeces and the disinfectant used to clean the floors. It was the smell of breath tainted with drugs. The smell permeated everyone’s hair and clothing.”

Johnson says she abandoned her planned role of impartial observer in the first week to work with the staff. She found it impossible to stand back and not respond to need. “I would come home exhausted, hyper, stressed out,” she recalls.

The women were confined in this way ostensibly because they were unmanageable in a more open environment. But when Johnson searched their files, trying to piece together their histories, she found the original reasons for their incarceration were often undocumented.

The system abused human rights, she says: “Their families were not involved in the decisions around their entrance to a locked unit. There wasn’t one family I interviewed who knew precisely why their relative was placed in that unit.”
There was no regular independent review of individual’s situation to determine whether incarceration could still be justified: “I don’t know of any other group of people who could spend 10 to 15 years locked away somewhere without some sort of review
or questioning.”
Two women had been moved to the unit from other parts of the institution simply because they were thought to be sexually “at risk” of rape or pregnancy; one was suspected of having been abused by a male inmate. And there was no expectation that any of the women could be helped; rather, there was an understanding that they should be controlled. Several staff acknowledged that cramming the women together intensified their problems because they learnt bad habits from each other.
No attempt had been made to discover the causes of the women’s original problem behaviors (such as running away or screaming), and there were no systematic program in place to help them improve. “That was the thing that most devastated me in that unit – the lack of things to do,” Johnson says. “Such incredible boredom, day after day after day.”

By the time the women inmates had been there for some time, she says, it would have been almost impossible to disentangle their original problems from the effects of the environment and the side-effects of medications.

Grim as it sounds, life in the unit was not totally devoid of kindness. The structure of the institution was rigid and controlling, but many of the staff were warm and patient with the women. Some loved even Brigid, for her spirit and humor, although they took care only to accept her kisses when blown from the other side of the room.

“There was always a lot of affection,” Johnson says. “There were massages, there were hugs. It was a very feeling place, in a lot of ways. I have memories of staff sitting with some women who were in pain for hours, just stroking them, trying to make them comfortable.”

Johnson, too, came to see the women’s humanity and individuality, where at first she had seen undifferentiated chaos. She sensed in them a longing to be womanly and live normal lives. “One of the things that really catches at me now was their desperate attempts to match the societal stereotypes of women – to look pretty, to be attractive,” she says. “The women who could use at least a few words articulated that they wanted to have kids, to work. Where they couldn’t articulate it, they would sit to have their hair done or makeup put on.”

Johnson believes her time in the unit allowed her to understand how “normal” people can treat those with disabilities as fundamentally different. There were moments when she became caught up herself.

“These women had terrible lives. I think it was very painful for anyone to confront those lives and the decisions that had been made in relation to them. You look for ways to protect yourself from that guilt and anxiety, and so you depersonalise them.

“It’s very difficult to know what these women made of the lives they led, what they felt about it, or what their inner desires were, because they couldn’t articulate them.”

During Johnson’s study, the then State Government announced Hilltop’s closure. Some of the women were relocated to community residential units, four- or five-bedroom houses staffed by carers. But not everyone was so fortunate. Brigid finished up in a country institution not unlike Hilltop.

“Some are better off now, but it’s not a fairy story; they don’t live happily ever after,” Johnson says. “The women who went into the community – I would have to say that their living conditions are incredibly better. They went into largely new housing where they had their own bedrooms and didn’t have to go through three locked doors to get a glass of water; where there were things to do.

“One woman took me out into the garden and showed me the strawberries and rhubarb she had helped plant. Another had helped make the cake we had for afternoon tea. ‘Laura’ had screamed a lot in the unit, but her screaming reduced considerably and then stopped some weeks after moving. That’s not true of all the woman. Others carried their behaviors with them.”
Johnson’s work cannot be consigned to history. Successive governments have continued to pursue a partial policy of returning people with disabilities to the community, but several large institutions remain, including those at Kew and Colac. Some have locked units, and others have units that are locked in all but name (“They remove the doorknobs from the inside,” Johnson says.)

She is concerned that there is a trend for governments worldwide to move back towards large institutions and says Victoria has recently committed resources to refurbishing some old institutions and building new ones.

She would like to see all large institutions closed. The living conditions at those remaining are probably better than at Hilltop, she says, but they share a similar structure and style. Johnson believes big institutions inevitably develop a culture in which the individual’s difficulties are viewed only from the administration’s perspective, as “management problems”.

She acknowledges there will always be some people so severely disabled that they require high levels of support. “But for the life of me, I can’t see why that has to happen in big places,” she says. She grimaces. “Other than for economic reasons.”

* Deinstitutionalising Women: An ethnographic study of institutional closure, by Kelley Johnson, Cambridge University Press, $29.95.

First published in The Age.

This woman’s war

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Betty Jeffrey must have been destined to live a long life. It’s hard to believe luck alone could have seen her through so much. Take the time she was sterilising instruments on a primus stove in a marquee on a tennis court in Malaya, where she was nursing wounded Australian troops in 1942.

She’d delayed taking cover when shelling started because the instruments were about to boil. A piece of shrapnel came whizzing into the tent, heading her way. One of the men cried out to her and, because she turned her head to answer, the hot metal missed her skull and merely grazed her cheek. The resulting welt lasted weeks.

Later that day, she took the walking wounded to a trench for protection during shelling. She recalls, “They were there for quite a while, and I thought, ‘It’s quiet now; I’ll go out and do their dressings.’
“I was halfway across the lawn when this lone bomber came across very low, just above the tree tops, machine-gunning the ground all the way. I just held the instrument tray above my head; it had a cloth with a red cross on it. He turned the gun off as he passed over me and then on again.”

Jeffrey was one of a group of Australian army nurses and other women and children captured by the Japanese and starved in prison camps on Sumatra for three-and-a -half years. Part of her story is being retold in a new anthology, As We Wave You Goodbye: Australian Women and War, edited by historian Jan Bassett.

The anthology includes a chapter from Jeffrey’s 1954 book, White Coolies, in which she described her years as a prisoner-of-war. Bruce Beresford’s 1997 film Paradise Road is based partly on her diaries.

Jeffrey, now 90, is still living alone and independently (she never married) in her sunny flat in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. She is uncomfortable with this latest round of publicity, conscious that she was just one of many and reluctant to make much of things that, at the time, simply had to be taken in one’s stride. This was a group for whom duty and service were paramount. She says quietly: “Every one of those girls can tell you stories like this. We were really in the war.”

“Those girls” are the army nurses who served on Singapore with Jeffrey. Most were evacuated safely before it fell to the Japanese in February 1942, but Jeffrey and 64 others had to wait for a second ship, the Vyner Brooke. They were not so lucky. They were attacked two days out of Singapore.

Jeffrey remembers: “There were three (Japanese) planes. They (machine-gunned) the lifeboats before they attacked; they were close enough to see that the ship was full of women and kids.

“They got a bomb down the funnel and then the ship itself. The bridge burst open and it went down in minutes.” Jeffrey and her matron were last off the ship, helping others into lifebelts, lowering what was left of the lifeboats and throwing overboard those too frightened to jump.

She and another nurse who could swim, Iole Harper, spent the next few hours tying fellow survivors to bits of flotsam and teaching them how to paddle in the direction of the low blue line that was the shore, 16 kilometres away. Jeffrey remembers no fear, but looking back, she says, it’s clear they were all in a blessed state of shock.

Her matron and the women and children on the matron’s raft were swept out to sea and never seen again. “Matron could do everything except swim and row,” she says sadly. “Nobody knows how many drowned. There were no records in Singapore.”

Jeffrey and Harper made it to shore. They cursed the coastal mangrove swamps through which they swam and trudged for hours, almost eaten alive by insects. They struggled from one fallen treetrunk to another until one of the trunks slid into the water with a splash – it was a crocodile. Eventually they were found by locals who took them to a village, where they were picked up by a Japanese patrol.

“Something goes wrong in your mind; you remember the good bits and you forget the awful bits.”

It was much later that they heard of the slaughter of other Vyner Brooke survivors further up the coast. Japanese troops had ordered civilian women and children and 22 army nurses to walk into the sea. Then they machine-gunned them from behind. The lone survivor, army nurse Vivian Bullwinkel, later joined Jeffrey in a prisoner-of-war camp. A total of 32 in the camp of 300 or so were survivors of the Vyner Brooke.

Jeffrey had wanted to be an army nurse from the time she was 12; she remembers hanging out of a tree and telling a visiting auntie so. She says she had always been adventurous and sensed that nursing troops meant adventure. So she signed up for the army reserve the moment she completed her nursing studies in 1937, aware that war was looming and nurses would be needed. “I thought, if there’s going to be a war, I’ll be in it! And was I ever.” She was called up in 1941 and sent to Malaya and then Singapore.

Ask Jeffrey today what life was like as a prisoner-of-war and she remembers first the camaraderie, the laughter and the makeshift games and concerts the women invented to keep their spirits up. “Something goes wrong in your mind,” says Jeffrey, “you remember the good bits and you forget the awful bits.”

The bad things come back into focus after we sift through the physical mementoes of her war. They are packed away in a small leather suitcase tied up with string and include copies of the musical scores, photo albums and a small, stained exercise book she stole from the desk of a Japanese officer. She hid the book throughout her imprisonment, filling it with sketches of camp life, Malay words she was trying to learn and dozens of recipes: cheese croquettes, breast of veal, chocolate eclairs.

The recipes were an attempt to ease the hunger and thirst, she says: “You wrote the recipes, your mouth would fill with water, you’d swallow it and then you’d feel like you’d had something to drink. In one of the camps there were 300 of us and one tap; it had no handle and only dripped.”

The women subsisted on a couple of handfuls of rice a day, supplemented by vegetable rubbish left over from the locals’ market stalls. The Japanese would tumble the shovellings straight on to the dusty road outside the camp, leaving them there two or three days in the tropical heat. “They were rotten, absolutely rotten,” Jeffrey says. “No wonder we all got dysentery.”

Sanitary arrangements were, at best, primitive and, at worst, in the final camp, non-existent; the flowing river that delighted the women on first sight turned out to be the public latrine for the whole region – and they were at the end of the line.

They were refused medicines and there was death after death from malnutrition, infected tropical ulcers, beri-beri and tropical fevers. Nurses who were so ill they could barely stand nursed dying comrades, unable to provide them with even basic comforts. Of the 65 young army nurses who left on the Vyner Brooke, only 24 came home to Australia.

After liberation in September 1945, the women discovered a nearby Japanese storeroom was loaded floor to ceiling with Western food and medicines, and that fresh fruit was rotting on trees outside the camp.

Jeffrey returned to Australia gaunt, weighing less than 30 kilograms. She had “all the malarias” and tuberculosis. After having been separated from her family for four years, she was forced to spend another two in hospital recuperating. She was well for several years after this, but her health collapsed again in the ’50s.

What does she think now of the Japanese? Her face goes blank. “I don’t think about them. I just don’t think about them.”

She visited Japan as a tourist after the war: “I was told by one of the doctors who was also a PoW, ‘You’ve got to get this out of your system; go to Japan. It’s a beautiful country’. I went to Japan and loved it. It did get it out of me, the hatred.”
But, while her rational mental processes have been brought to heel, there are other avenues to memory she finds harder to block. Smells and sounds – cooking aromas and chatter from young Asian neighbors – can throw her back unexpectedly and most distressingly.

Looking back, she says, there are no choices she would have made differently, but there is one thing she would change if she could: “I would bring all those girls home, instead of them dying in the prison camp. Bonza girls, they were.”

First published in The Age.

Kernot suffers in boys’ sandpit

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When my daughter was a toddler, we had a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with the local playhouse, where mothers minded each other’s children. She spent most of her time there cowering in a corner of the sandpit, terrified of the rambunctious boys who outnumbered the girls three to one. The boys dominated the play space, careering wildly around on trikes and turning the most innocent toys into fearsome weapons. Territoriality ruled, OK?

In the end, we gave up and waited for kinder, where her own sex had a critical mass and were able to fend off the worst excesses.

That’s the problem with “letting boys be boys”. It means that there’s no room for girls. There are times when that’s OK – girls need times with just their own sex too. But there are times when it’s destructive. Ask Federal politician Cheryl Kernot.

Kernot’s recent stint in the stocks disproves Naomi Wolf’s thesis that the “no-vagina rule” (which decrees that anyone with a vagina will be forbidden success in the workforce or in public life) has been replaced by a “no-uterus rule” (you’re allowed to be female and successful as long as you don’t dare try to also fit motherhood into your life – in other words, as long as you play the game the way blokes do, with long hours, etc).

Times have not changed as much as Wolf would like to think. Kernot has been described by Liberal MP Don Randall as having “the morals of an alley cat on heat”.

The basis for this? A serious relationship 21 years ago with a younger (but adult) man who happened to have been a former student of hers. Randall also made unsubstantiated suggestions of an intimate relationship between Kernot and Senator Gareth Evans.
The fact that such abuse can be heaped upon a female public figure in a formal forum suggests that, in some quarters at least, the double standard is alive and well. Any bright young woman who wants to enter the public sphere had better be sure that she marries as a virgin and remains monogamous thereafter. Anything that could be construed as at all untoward will be noted, broadcast and punished.
Contrast this with the treatment meted out to the leader of the Western World in recent weeks. If you believe half the women who have come out of the woodwork in the past few months, the United States President moonlights as an out-of-control garden hose.
This would be neither here nor there were it not for the way he has allegedly used the Oval Office as the door into a bulk warehouse of firm young flesh..

But no one has had the bad manners to stand up in Congress and call him an alley cat. His popularity rating with ordinary Americans has actually increased. Sexual encounters outside of marriage have always been more tolerated in men who hold public office than women.
But Clinton has escaped lightly (to date), partly for the same reason that the attacks on Kernot have served to bring her sympathy: no one much cares.

Randall is living in a time warp. Even the matronly Women’s Weekly finds the notion of the scarlet woman a bit of a giggle, sending it up with a cover picture of Kernot in a slinky red dress. Randall is talking to an electorate in which up to 30 per cent of wives have had extra-marital affairs and one-in-three women have had abortions. Boys will be boys, and girls will be tarts? That’s an awful lot of french pastry.
But boys are still boys in that they resent having to make room for girls, especially smart, capable girls who rival them for voters’ pet. Any girl who’s had to share the boys’ sandpit recognises when a tom cat is spraying his territory.

First published in The Age.

A mother’s love, continued

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Joan Golding’s life as a Warrandyte housewife was changed forever when she nursed her son, who was dying of AIDS. KAREN KISSANE reports on an unlikely activist.

JOAN GOLDING is 74. She has grey hair and laughter wrinkles and five great-grandchildren. She lives in Warrandyte with her husband, Ron, and goes to church on Sundays. Right now she is fussing over what to wear to her next social engagement. She is to be guest of honor at the Gay Rage Ball and judge the fancy-dress competition.

“I didn’t know what I could possibly wear,” she confides, amused at her own preoccupation with the question. “Then I remembered that, back in my weaving days, I won an international competition for making a grey Shetland lace evening dress, very lacy and floaty and fairy queenish, and I think it will be perfect. They’ll love it, they’ll just love it, I know.” And the woman the gay community calls “the queen mother” beams her grandmotherly smile.

It’s her trump card, really, that harmless-little-old-lady packaging. She grins when asked if she has ever been abused at any of her public talks on AIDS, and asks: “Who’s going to be rude to their grandmother?”

Golding disarms people by the way she tells her story, which she has done over and over again since she spent three years nursing her dying son Martin, who had AIDS. She holds on to that story the way the madonna holds on to the body of the dead Christ in Michelangelo’s Pieta.

But while the marble mother is forever frozen in that defining moment, for Golding, the experience of losing her all-too-human son was a radicalising one that launched her into a new life. She has become what the Greeks call a doula, a woman who mothers other mothers. And she has ventured a long way from the shelter of her middle-class cocoon.

Golding’s story begins at home, in the little house set among Warrandyte’s rolling hills and piping bellbirds, where she raised her four children. She gave up her work in a university physics department to stay home with them while Ron travelled the world pursuing his career in physics.

When the children were grown and left home, Ron worried about how she would fill her time while he was travelling – “I think he saw the spectre of the sherry bottle in the background” – and for her 50th birthday he gave Golding a spinning wheel, so
that she could play a contented Penelope by the fireside to his gallivanting Odysseus. She dutifully learnt to spin, and spun until she had a wool pile of fairytale proportions.

To find a way to use the wool, she enrolled in a beginner’s weaving course and then a professional course. She finished up on the staff of the college lecturing in textile technology – “which was not what Ron had intended when he bought me the spinning wheel” – and was later hired by the Australian Wool Board to act as a consultant to the Thai silk industry. This necessitated a lot of travelling throughout South-East Asia, teaching spinning and dyeing and weaving.

Martin, meanwhile, was their youngest – clever, funny, the kid who loved being the centre of attention. After he finished his university degree, he applied to the Department of Foreign Affairs for a position as trainee diplomat, along with 25,000 others. He was one of five who succeeded.

Joan Golding had known Martin was gay since his teens, though he didn’t know she knew until one day when he came from uni to have lunch with her. They ate on the wide timber balcony that runs the length of their house, a place in which many of their family dramas have been played out. As he left, he called from the door, “I’m homosexual, you know.” She called back, “I know, darling.” And so he came back in to talk to her about it. “I often wonder how he enjoyed his lunch that day,” she says drily.

Golding felt sad about some of the consequences of her son’s homosexuality – the fact that he would have no children, and that he would be a bit of an outsider with the larger community – but it did nothing to change her relationship with him. The great tearing grief came years later, on that same balcony, when he flew back from Holland to tell her that he had AIDS and was dying. “It was the worst moment of my life,” she says. Golding was surprised when he asked her if he could die at home. She promised to nurse him until then. She had no idea what she was committing herself to.

“There are many, many AIDS-related illnesses,” she says, “and it seems to me that very often people are affected in the areas they would least like to be. The gorgeous-looking men develop this frightful Karposi’s sarcoma. They end up with raised purple blotches, looking the most terrible freaks. People like dancers and athletes will lose the use of their legs from a nerve disease. And Martin, who was so bright, and so sharp, and such a reader, lost his eyesight and developed dementia.

“He had to be led around and fed. His continence went because of the dementia. For someone who had so much dignity . . . and yet his illness was not physically painful, which is something to be grateful for.”

For much of this time, gratitude was not Martin’s strong suit. He was venomously angry and directed most of it at Golding. She says this is typical of young AIDS sufferers being nursed by their mothers. “It’s about how you’re going to be there when he’s gone; they’re resentful, they’re frightened . . . the mother is the only person in the whole world that he would speak to like this, and it’s because he knows that she loves him and she will still be there. But it’s very hard to remember that when you’re being screamed at.”

And Martin knew just how to wield the stiletto. Golding would take enormous pains with his food and he would complain bitterly about how boring it was. She would beg him to stop embarrassing her with his rudeness to others during hospital visits and he would sneer at her for being so middle-class – “This terrible insult,” she chuckles.

He knew just how far he could go before turning on the wicked charm that always brought laughter and instant forgiveness. The bitterness is something they all go through, she says, “and then it calms. I think they must spend all their time thinking about death and the end of their lives and eventually must come to some sort of reconciliation in their minds”.

As Martin became sicker, mothering took on the physical intimacy of babyhood: feeding, washing, lifting, changing clothes, even reading him children’s story books because he could no longer follow adult ones. By the end, in May 1989, they were so close “he was like the baby in the womb again”.

He died the peaceful death that she had prayed for and afterwards Golding felt fulfilled. She had been given the strength to do as he wanted and she expected now to get on with her life. The problem was that she found she could settle to nothing. The AIDS patients at Fairfield had an idea. Please would she speak to their mothers?
Golding knew how hard it was to be alone with this ordeal. The family had united to help, and Martin’s partner moved in with them, but they had not told their wider circle about Martin’s illness. The few people who did know – the local vicar, doctor and dentist – were less than helpful at first. They struggled on alone until the day that a very weak Martin decided he wanted to go to church. She and Ron half-carried him up the aisle and found themselves surrounded by friends trying to hug them and shake their hands.

“We were met by such a wave of love and compassion that I knew that these people, who knew us so well, had realised that there was something very wrong in our family. And we had denied them the opportunity of supporting us, and I felt very badly about that.” Once the local community knew, the family had visits from people they hadn’t seen since Martin was in kindergarten.

“I try now to persuade people who are in that situation at least to tell their family and their close friends, but I have hardly any success because people are so terrified about community attitudes. There are women in the country and in ethnic families who are struggling on utterly alone.” Often their husbands are little support because they are overwhelmed with shame about their sons’ homosexuality, she says; while mothers grieve for the death sentence, conservative fathers are more devastated by the perceived slur on their manhood.

“I’m always telling families that if only they can get rid of the pride that goes with worrying about what other people think and will say and will do, there’s enormous freedom. And, if ever I do convince them, they have the same experience that we did. People are happy to support each other, given the whole truth.”
Golding’s early relationship with the gay community and the AIDS Council was tentative because they were suspicious of this conservative-looking do-gooder and she had her reservations about some of their activities. “That was in the days when Act-Up (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was very busy, and I used to spend a lot of time cringing. They did shocking things like tearing up all the seedlings from the floral clock in St Kilda Road, painting slogans and stopping people getting into meetings. But they have all died or lost their go now.” She sighs. “Unfortunately.”

Many angry young men with AIDS lock their families out, says Dr Ron McCoy, who works with AIDS patients. They might have been rejected by their families because of their sexuality, or they might have hidden it until they became sick. This can make for painful tensions between the patient, the biological family and the “family of affiliation”, the patient’s lovers and friends in the gay community.

“Joan recognises that all relationships are important,” McCoy says. “She said that when Martin died she couldn’t go back to weaving, but I actually think what she’s doing now is exactly the same thing. She’s working with families that are splintered and joining them back up. She’s weaving the social fabric.”

Golding drives all over Victoria in the little green car given to her by the AIDS Council. She is available to families who phone in crisis and several times a week talks to any groups that care to listen: schoolchildren, health professionals, clergy, men’s clubs, ladies’ luncheons. Like a good novelist, she knows that preaching kills a story, so she tells hers straight and lets people make of it what they will.

Sometimes they tell her that her son would be so proud of what she’s doing. It makes her laugh. She can still hear that voice groaning, “Mum, you’re so middle-class!”

Volunteers will be selling red ribbons for World AIDS Day tomorrow.

First published in The Age.

Jung in the first stone

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Feminists raged at The First Stone. Now Karen Kissane looks at another perspective.

There will always be these moments, I know, when people who think politically and types like me with a metaphysical bent end up staring at each other in helpless silence, with our mouths open. 
— Helen Garner, in a speech to the Sydney Institute about critical response to her book The First Stone.

HELEN GARNER did not spring from nature’s loins ready-made as a “type with a metaphysical bent”. She used to be very much a political animal. As a ’70s feminist she went to consciousness- raising groups, wrote women’s lib newsletters, helped desperate women get abortions.

But now she is irritated by her feminist tag. “People kept portraying me in the papers as a well-known feminist,” she says impatiently. “If I was Germaine Greer, it would be understandable, but I’ve never been a professional feminist. I was a feminist over the last 15 years or so only in the sense that any intelligent woman with a sense of justice would call herself a feminist.

At her age, she says, she realises that it is no longer clear where “fault” lies in the problems between individual men and women: “It’s an illusion that it ever was clear.”
Where does all this leave The First Stone? The book has been read mainly as feminist – or anti-feminist – argument.

But Garner now disdains ideological barrows and those who push them; political thinking is crude and simplistic, she says, and ideologues chop great bits out of reality to make it fit their world view. So if she was not writing a political analysis, what was it that she tried to do? A book conceived as investigative journalism ended more as an exploration of the writer’s own sensibility, with Garner planted at the centre of the story. She experiences a sequence of strange events and encounters, rather like a dreamer does, and later wrestles with analysing their deeper meanings for herself and others. It is as if she tries to examine the Ormond affair the way a Jungian would dissect a dream or a legend, delving behind its symbolism to find the patterns beneath.

In her author’s note Garner writes that she had raised the Ormond College story to a level where “its archetypal features have become visible”. Archetype is a term Jung used to describe symbols that form part of the collective unconscious in human minds. Archetypes are the stuff of myth, eternal images and stories that keep surfacing across different times and cultures in dreams, art, religion and literature.

This is just one of the Jungian concepts Garner uses. In the text she talks about “eros” and “anima” and tries at times to work out what was happening in the unconscious of some of the people she interviewed. She talks about how even for old men, judges represent the father; she suggests that the Ormond case tapped into a widespread anxiety, “something dark about fathers and daughters”.

Garner has been interested in Jung for some years and has attended Jungian conferences at La Trobe University. Earlier this year she said that her time with her former therapist, Melbourne Jungian analyst Peter O’Connor, several years ago had helped teach her “the language of the imagination”.

Had she tried to apply Jungian thought to the Ormond incident, and if so, does it work?
We wrote to Garner asking for an interview. She was reluctant to reignite the feminist debate but was pleased.

We made a date for our own interview. But Garner had expected that a Jungian analysis of the book by others was to be brought to her for comment, not that she was to describe her own attempts to conduct one. The more she was pressed, the more she withdrew.

She says: “The word archetype isn’t one that I really feel very confident about using, but it does seem to me that there are a limited number of story shapes in the world, in people’s human experiences; that’s why old people are rarely surprised by things.”
So what did she mean when she wrote that she had made the Ormond story’s archetypal features visible? “I don’t remember.

I just don’t remember. I wrote that author’s note at a time of extreme tension and anxiety, when I didn’t know if all those years of work were going to come to anything.

“I don’t think the story’s archetypal features have become visible, in retrospect. The only way I could have made them visible is if I had written it as a novel . . . There are freedoms in novels that there are not in non-fiction . . . I had to let the facts stand in the way of a good story – such facts as I could discover.”

Others have done archetypal analyses that have been less than flattering. In Arena Magazine John Docker argued that Garner portrayed Alan Gregory, whom she re-named Shepherd, as a Christ-like figure, a meek and gentle carer of his flock, “an outsider to and victim of those with worldly interests, the moneychangers”.

But one of the complainants she calls Elizabeth Rosen was painted as a Jewish princess with Medusa-like power, “that familiar figure, the Jew as other, foreign, alien . . . destroying, heartless, lurking”. Docker concluded: “What interests (Garner) is that she also, avowedly patient and gentle, a spurned mater dolorosa, is crucified, along with Dr Shepherd. By book’s end they are both martyrs, Christian victims of the Jew. What an odd view of the last 2000 years of European history.”

Garner is appalled into speechlessness by this interpretation, and denies the accusation by author Cassandra Pybus that her description of Rosen conjures up that vengeful man-hating figure, the “vagina dentata”.

But there is no question that Garner portrays Rosen as another archetype: the beautiful goddess whose lures the mortal cannot withstand. She writes: “It is impossible not to be moved by her daring beauty. She is a woman in the full glory of her youth, as joyful as a goddess, elated by her own careless authority and power.”

Later Garner suggests that Rosen has not “taken the responsibility of learning to handle the effects, on men, of her beauty and her erotic style of self-representation”. She asks: “Has a girl like Elizabeth Rosen even the faintest idea what a powerful anima figure she is to the men she encounters in her life? She told the court that Dr Shepherd had got down on his knees before her. Which of them does the word humiliated apply to, here?”

Garner sees little point in trying to explain her use of anima. It is a term that Jung used to describe the “feminine”, intuitive, feeling parts of a man’s psyche. She says it is a useful concept but – “when you talk about it briefly it comes out sounding too pat and glib”.

IN HIS 1985 book Understanding Jung, O’Connor writes that a man who is out of touch with his anima may experience it forcefully in mid-life when he “projects” it on to women.

The erotic fantasies or extra-marital affairs that result are really signs of the man’s longing to connect with his own feminine side, O’Connor argues. Consciously or unconsciously, then, Garner has Rosen summoning forth this aspect of Shepherd.

The Rosen-as-anima passages are central to feminist bile about the book because they suggest that a beautiful girl in a sexy dress should expect to trigger in some men the reaction of a kid in a candy shop: an uncontrollable urge to plunder. It’s not far from this to “She asked for it.”

In fact, what Garner believes is that young women should take responsibility for their desire to provoke desire, should understand that it can have unforeseen results, and should be able to deal with minor uninvited skirmishes directly and with grace.

She is right that a feminist gender analysis – like those done on the basis of class or race – will never be the last word on the Ormond affair, or any other phenomenon. Life is too complicated for anything to be viewed fully through a single filter. But if we did not look at class and race and gender, we would not understand how cruelly they can limit people.

And, while her critics need to recognise that Garner was in many ways writing more as a novelist than an essayist, the fact that she tried to write on one level does not mean she cannot be examined on another. Jungianism and feminist politics have their crossroads.

Jana Salonen, a tutor at the University of Melbourne who is writing her doctorate on feminism and psychoanalysis, says: “Garner’s brand of Jungianism appeals to women’s patience and understanding of errant male projections on to women.
In practical terms, this amounts to little more than the politics of tolerance and good sportism. It leaves social justice and ideological change dependent on men’s psychic `evolution’.

The book’s value, she says, is that it has taken the sexual debate outside the stockade of ideological jargon and into the language of ordinary experience. Fair enough.

The danger is that Garner’s version of the Ormond story will become a new archetype, that of the sexual harassment case in which a pitiful man is wronged by vengeful harpies about a trivial matter.

Two years ago The Age reported on a shop assistant at a cheesecake factory who was persecuted by male workmates who, among other things, pinned a note to her bike that said “Tina sux dog’s balls all day long”. To try to avoid comments about her body Tina dressed in kaftan-like clothes that left only her face and hands uncovered. When she fled the job she changed her name because it had been linked with so much abuse that it was poisoned for her.

No one wrote a book about Tina. But then, a cheesecake factory is not Ormond College, and a shopgirl forced out of her job cannot be compared with a master who loses his career. Can she?

First published in The Age.