Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

In Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia, rather than a chronicling of second-wave feminist history in Australia, Margaret Henderson analyses the ways in which both feminists and anti-feminist have chosen to record their own history.  Looking at how participants and opponents of women’s liberation have approached the recording of feminist history, Henderson uses a theoretical framework from Freudian theories of memory, forgetting, hysteria and displacement.  This approach enables a fascinating flexibility in how she examines the fictional and non-fictional texts that attempt to record Australian feminist history.

The inclusion of analysis of anti-feminist narratives, in particular that of the ‘men’s movement’ of the late twentieth century, allows for an insight into how the dominant culture has reacted to feminist gains and shifts in gender identity.  Henderson discovers a disturbing trend of ‘forgetting’ among these oppositional texts in that they refuse to engage with the major gains of the feminist movement, such as equal pay, sexual discrimination legislation, and pro-choice campaigns.  Instead, the anti-feminists focus on a mythical notion of a golden pre-feminist age where ‘natural’ gender roles were unchallenged and in which men’s unearned privilege was unquestioned.  These mythical beliefs rely on a lack of historical evidence and instead construct a fiction of the past that denies any structural or institutional forms of sexism.  Henderson approaches her discussion of these anti-feminist texts with much delight in their irony, and the way in which she dissects the text’s philosophical and logical paradoxes is done with subtle humour and cool analysis.

In examining the biological essentialism of William Phillips’s Developing Manhood: The Testosterone Agenda (2001), Henderson isolates the author’s “nostalgia for the traditional gender order, hegemonic masculinity and the patriarchal nuclear family” (218).  Henderson points out the Phillips’s reliance on a notion of hormone-controlled men is “blind to the discourse of testosterone that has been used to justify men’s violence against women and children (and other men)” (222).  Henderson locates a form of ‘amnesia’ inherent to anti-feminist texts that sever “the women’s movement from its fundamental notion of choice” (220) and undermine their own arguments of biological determinism of gender roles by insisting that feminism is instead imposing a “rigid gender framework” (220).  The texts of the ‘men’s movement’ are revealed to be rife with:

historical generalisations, compression and vagueness about … bygone eras … a pastiche of working-class men’s labour and the stereotype of middle-class women’s lives in the 1950s … [and] implicit valorisation of men’s labour over women’s and, as part of this, a justification of stereotypically traditional gender roles (219)

Much pleasure can be had by feminist readers in Henderson’s discussion of the inherent flaws in the weak, simplistic, and (barely disguised) misogynist arguments of the men’s movement.  This section of her book allows for some comical relief after the rather dark, and at times depressing, discussions of the feminist movement’s attempts to write its own history.  The deeply self-critical way that Australian feminists have approached their own history contains its own forms of ‘amnesia’ in that they rarely focus on the accomplishments of feminism.  As Henderson points out, “for a movement that did so much in a couple of decades, it is surprising how non-triumphal, uncelebratory or, at least, modest, the memories have been” (240).  Given that Australia is currently governed by a deeply conservative party which, by its policies and cutbacks to social services, has shown a strong resentment to feminism, and a glorification of 1950s gender roles, it is perhaps not surprising that feminist histories are marked by what Henderson describes as a ‘melancholia’ and ‘mourning’ in her analysis of feminist biographies, documentaries, film and novels.

The feminist movement is, more often than not, a collective movement of groups of women giving their time voluntarily to assist other women in gaining equal recognition in the workplace, choice in reproductive technology, and avenues in the law to protect themselves from violence.  However, as Henderson discovers, this focus on collective achievement has proved too difficult and ‘alternative’ for the mainstream media to digest, thus instead certain feminists, such as Germaine Greer and Anne Summers, have been cast as solitary heroines, made to be representative of the entire movement.  The women’s bestselling feminist books, Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Summer’s Dammed Whores and God’s Police remain to this day ‘seminal’ Australian feminist texts and have enabled the woman to take on an iconic role in the public’s understanding of the movement.  In journalist accounts of these feminists and their books, “Greer is represented as the virtual instigator of the women’s movement and a feminist heroine” (151) who “plays up to our stereotypes of the revolutionary, the outrageous ‘women’s libber’, the iconoclastic individual who causes social upheaval” (157).   Meanwhile, Summers is portrayed by the media as being “concerned with placing women on the historical record … [in] commentary that is more analytical and measured” (153).  However, as Henderson discovers in her analysis of articles by and about Greer and Summers, they are both as challenging to the mainstream culture (and to the workings of the feminist movement itself) in their many articles which “provoke debate over the past and future of the Australian Women’s movement” (153).

In covering a broad range of genres, including radio, television, journalism, film and autobiography, Henderson discovers further ‘amnesia’ and denial of a feminist past both inside and outside the movement itself.  Autobiography in particular has given voice to feminists from a variety of radical and ‘femocrat’ backgrounds.  However, despite the diverse backgrounds of these women, a common theme emerges of current dissatisfaction with younger feminists and a nostalgic glorification of the more radical women of the 1970s.  The older women’s interpretation of the current conservatism of younger feminists is mirrored in the younger feminists attitudes that these ‘second wavers’ were too dogmatic and not as concerned with the pluralism, and emphasis on difference, characterised by the DIY ‘third wavers’ of the late 1990s.

What is most interesting about Henderson’s examination of feminists’ recording of history is the way she has isolated the many gaps in memory, and thus offers a challenge to contemporary feminists to rework their history into a more comprehensive analysis.  For myself, as a ‘third wave’ feminist, the historical accounts of feminism, that Henderson discusses, speak of a culture that, at times, correlates with my memory of radicalisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but, for the most part, these feminist histories seems to lack the energy and joy I experienced as a young feminist.  While memory itself is deeply unreliable and undoubtably clouded by the mood of the present, I tend to agree with Henderson’s surprise over the often deeply negative accounts of feminist history.  

Since feminism itself is a movement which privileges choice, new ideas, challenges to deeply entrenched gender roles, and the institutions and structures which maintain them, it is a movement constantly in flux, perpetually reacting and recreating ideas of liberation.  As a living and evolving philosophy feminism remains a cultural force that consistently celebrates self-critique and thus its very framework exists outside the more traditional versions of history that concentrate on heroism and battles.  For feminism, the battle is not over yet, and theoretically feminism has, for the most part, rejected dogma in favour of debate.  Thus Henderson’s book marks a notion of feminist time that is open to re-interpretation by later generations, and exposes a desire for further improvement in women’s lives. 

In short, her analysis of feminist versions of their history is characterised by an open-ended chronicling of the movement.  In other words, not only is Australian feminist history itself not over yet, neither are the accounts of this history by Australian feminists.  Henderson’s book certainly offers a great deal of signposts for younger feminist academics to take on the challenge of recording more balanced accounts of feminism that embrace not only the difficulties but also the achievements, which, as Henderson has discovered, remain to be recorded and celebrated.


Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia
(2006)

by Margaret Henderson
Peter Lang AG
ISBN: 3039108476
US-ISBN: 0-8204-8038-X
286pp