Therefore, the contemporary struggle to advance women’s rights does not concern the legitimacy of feminism per se but rather a struggle within feminism. This struggle essentially entails a dichotomy between an ideological approach concerning the nature of gender relations and one which respects the diversity of women’s interests. The Grouper approach to feminism accorded with the latter approach and it is still valid.
Catholicism has been caricatured as socially regressive in relation to the role of women. However, in Australia, education was the great socio-economic equalizer and it was Catholic nuns who were at the forefront of providing teaching which enabled millions of Catholics to advance before the advent of state aid to non-government schools. The cutting edge role which nuns as educators had fulfilled led to an appreciation by many Australian Catholics in the 1940s and 1950s that women could have a transformative impact on society.
It was therefore not surprising that Catholic women were active in the ALP in the 1940s and 1950s and that, with the Split and the subsequent formation of the DLP, there was a specialized role for women. Mrs. Mary Barry who helped run the Carlton branch of the ALP in Melbourne established a Women’s Central Organising Committee in the DLP which ensured that women had an important role in policy formation and in running the new party.
The Split gave women who had previously been frustrated in the ALP- due to the domination by men from the union movement- a capacity to make a substantial contribution to the DLP and in doing so helped ensure its initial survival. It should also not be forgotten that the female secretarial staff who worked in the ALP headquarters at the Victorian Trades Hall Council also displayed great physical courage in staying in their offices and remaining loyal to the legitimate ALP state branch executive led by Frank Mc Manus.
The DLP headquarters which was eventually established in Melbourne greatly benefited from the transferral of secretarial staff from the ALP. Indeed, the DLP was renowned for its administrative efficiency which came from having a dedicated cadre of office staff. These staff workers were predominately female. In the period between the DLP’s loss of its Senate seats in 1974 and the closure of the Melbourne headquarters in 1978, the party still cohesively functioned due to the commitment of its secretarial staff. Women in the DLP were also elected to executive positions within the party, e.g. Leone Lloyd of the Federated Clerks Union (FCU) was elected Victorian president of the DLP.
As a political party the DLP was ahead of its time in that it advocated equal pay for women. DLP union affiliates such as the FCU and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) had a majority of female membership (which the latter still does and entitles it to claim to be Australia’s largest women’s organisation).
The FCU and the SDA both pursued policies which advanced the interests of women. The SDA in the 1970s established the first women’s bureau which had Australia’s first union branch Women’s Officer. However, the FCU’s and the SDA’s belief that their member’s rates of pay should be based on a capacity to support a family and that women were entitled to paid maternity leave was not supported by other feminist activists in the Australian union movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. (The latter objective is now an accepted mainstay of the Austrian union movement).
The opposition toward the FCU and the SDA’s women policies came from ideological feminists in the Australian union movement who rejected the notion that women’s specialized needs should be accommodated in relation to often being primary care givers in families. Support for women fulfilling the role as the primary care giver in a family does not mean that they should necessarily be expected to fulfil, or be restricted, to fulfilling this role. Rather government policies supporting the role of women as primary care givers in families is representative of the diversity of women’s interests and roles in society and that women who choose to fulfil such a role should be respected and supported.
Although the Keating ALP federal government (1991 to 1996) was avowedly ‘pro-woman’, the loss of votes amongst women was a key demographic which resulted in the ALP being voted out in a landslide. For all the socially inequitable industrial policies which the Howard coalition government (1996 to 2007) pursued, it still appreciated the value of family friendly policies to hold support amongst women voters. Under the federal coalition government, grants were paid to first home owners, as there was a baby bonus and there were moves to bring in paid maternity leave. A personal quirk of Howard’s in his pursuit of pro-family policies may have been his long term interest in the Women’s Action Alliance (WAA).
The WAA was established in 1975 with the support of the FCU and the SDA. This organisation supports the interests and special needs of women and this extends to women in a family environment. In this context, the WAA has stood apart from rival women’s organisations such as the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) by supporting a stay at home payment for mothers and opposing ‘affirmative action’ (sic) quotas. The electoral support which the Howard government garnered from its pro-family policies was not sustainable in the long term. Legislation such as Work Choices Act 2006 was ultimately anti-family because it adversely affected employee pay and conditions.
The new Rudd-Gillard government has moved quite correctly to jettison the onerous policies of the Howard government such as Work Choices. In deciding whether to proceed to eliminate other Howard era policies, the first criterion should be the social effects of these policies. If the new federal government removes polices which supported a woman’s role in a family environment, it may find itself heading toward the same inexorable electoral decline which befell the Keating government which took its policy direction on women’s and family policy from WEL.
Women’s issues are a vital area in which social action can be taken to promote social democracy. A beneficial aspect which came out of the tragedy of the Split was that it brought women to the fore in the DLP. This in turn supported an emphasis within Grouper unions on recognising the value of women’s issues facilitating social democracy. The Grouper tradition in relation to women’s issues is a rich one and one which the new federal government should draw on.