REBELS, RESISTANCE FIGHTERS AND ROLE MODELS
Women used to live their lives, die, and then, within a generation or two, just disappear. While there is nothing unusual about this and most people die leaving hardly a trace, it is worth noting that almost every woman who has ever lived has disappeared without there being much of a record—or even a memory—of her existence. Women’s invisibility is bad while they are alive, but it is absolute after they die. As Virginia Woolf pointed out, ‘For most of history, Anonymous was a woman’.
If women change their names upon marriage, and most of them still do, they become very hard to find and trace, as anyone who has done their family tree will know. If you’ve ever tried to organise a school reunion for a girls’ or co-ed school (I have—three times), you will know how much harder it is to trace old female schoolmates than male ones. On social media, when women try to reconnect with old friends, they often have to explain that they used to have a different last name. We literally erase women’s identity as individuals from our memory. The only legacy they are allowed is as the portals through which new generations of people, especially male ones, enter the world. Women in the past—and still, in some parts of the developing world—earned their status entirely as the mothers of sons. Mothers of only daughters, like me, could forget it. My husband was once kindly commiserated with when he told some local women he was working with in Thailand that he had no sons but two daughters. They were astonished when he gently rejected their sympathy and told them he was overjoyed with his daughters and would not trade them for a truckload of sons. ‘You are a very good man,’ one of the women told him quietly.
The scarcity of women in history, the lack of information about their lives, used to be the only legacy of countless generations of the human female. Their work, their love, their energy, hopes and dreams were regarded as ephemeral and unimportant. No doubt they made an enormous impact on those they lived with—and still do, as countless anonymous women continue to quietly toil away to feed their children and keep them safe, or contribute to their communities in myriad ways—but their indispensable contribution has been taken entirely for granted for millennia. Much of the business of their lives—how they dealt with menstruation, sex, childbirth, all the way to menopause—was rendered literally unspeakable. Trying to find information on such things and how they were dealt with in the past is very difficult. Little exists even though they are the commonly lived experience of half the human race. When we made the functions of women’s bodies taboo, we very effectively silenced them about almost everything. If their bodies were invisible, it seems the women became so as well.
Apart from a few major personalities, often only given opportunity by accident of birth (queens such as Elizabeths I and II and Victoria spring to mind), women’s lives were lived quietly and invisibly, and their deaths were recorded in the same way. They were the support gender, very rarely the star of the show. And this, I think, is one of the legacies that this revolutionary generation of women has begun to change. Women are demanding they be noticed, reckoned with and remembered in ways they never have before. Quite apart from women having gestated, birthed and (usually) raised every genius who has ever lived, not to mention the research that indicates the DNA inherited from your mother has more influence on your intelligence than that inherited from your father, there are other contributions that many of us, despite the barriers, have managed to make. There are endless memes on social media listing the women who contributed to major scientific, technical and literary steps forward and yet have been written out of history. I was open-mouthed to discover, for example, that the magnificent illustrations in the famous publication The Birds of Australia were not created by the credited author, John Gould, as I had always thought, but by his wife, Elizabeth!
There are many other women (past counting, probably) who have been left out of history despite the value and importance of their contribution—not least in science. Rosalind Franklin, whose work using X-rays to take pictures of DNA was critical to its discovery, was entirely ignored when her colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. How many girls (or boys) were ever taught about Ada Lovelace, daughter of the romantic poet Lord Byron, who is credited with writing the first computer program in 1843? Her contribution to computing was only acknowledged in 2009, when Ada Lovelace Day was created (it’s 13 October, if you are interested). Hollywood Golden Age movie star Hedy Lamarr has finally been credited with an invention she made during World War II that led to today’s wireless technology. But when my generation of women were at school, did we ever hear about any of them?
I was hungry for female heroes and role models when I was a girl, and it was hard to find any that were not soppy (the Lady with the Lamp), came to a sticky end (Joan of Arc) or were glamorous but reviled (Mata Hari—and she came to a sticky end as well). I clearly remember as a schoolgirl that whenever I stood up for my gender, boys could shut me down easily by asking me to name any woman who had contributed anything to history. I clung to the few I knew about—such as Marie Curie and Elizabeth I—in desperation, but even to me, two seemed like the exception that proved the rule. If only my generation had known about all the women who’d had their contributions ignored, overlooked and dismissed. But we did not. In fact, even when the woman’s contribution was so important it could not be entirely disappeared, it was often reduced to an acceptable and sentimentally feminised one. Florence Nightingale (the abovementioned Lady with the Lamp) is the best example of this. She was famous, when I was young, as the archetypal self-sacrificing and nurturing woman who created the modern nursing profession, but I was amazed when I read her biography by Cecil Woodham-Smith (I recommend it) to discover she was a prickly and obstinate rebel who not only transformed nursing but practically ran the British War Office from her invalid’s bed, and revolutionised sanitation in both England and India and so saved many millions of lives.
When I was young, and that is not so very long ago, women were still deliberately prevented from making a contribution. When the US began developing its space program in the 1950s, doctors tested both men and women to qualify as the first astronauts. Thirteen out of the nineteen women pilots who applied passed the rigorous tests. Eighteen of the thirty-two male applicants also passed. Yet, in the end, it was decided not to allow the women to fly. Astronaut John Glenn explained their omission as simply being ‘a fact of our social order’. Other men were not so subtle: one NASA rocket engineer, when asked why women were not going into space, joked that the male astronauts were very much in favour of the idea and quoted his boss, Bob Gilruth, as saying, ‘We’re reserving 110 pounds of pay-load for recreational equipment.’ You guys, you’re just so damn funny (not). The message my generation of women were constantly being sent was not that men were deliberately holding us back but that we were not good enough. It makes me angry as I write this to think of the hurt and harm such completely false messages did to an entire gender. Our hopes were dashed before we’d even really had a chance to form them.
One of the legacies of this revolutionary generation, accidentally or not, is that they and the women following them are beginning to rediscover and publicise the contributions women have made. People of colour and the LGBTQI community are doing the same. During NAIDOC Week 2018, for example, Indigenous women’s contributions were celebrated by people who showcased different women all week on social media. Businesswoman Dr Kirstin Ferguson made 2017 the year of celebrating women by focusing on one woman of achievement a day on Twitter under the hashtag #celebratingwomen. She and Catherine Fox have since co-authored a book, Women Kind, about how such a simple idea became a social media phenomenon. As I have already mentioned, comedian Hannah Gadsby became an international sensation in mid-2018 after her confronting one-woman show Nanette became a Netflix special. For an hour, alone at a mic on the stage of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, Gadsby deconstructs how she has used comedy to disguise the truth of her life, the pain inflicted on her by others for her gender nonconformity, and the pain she has inflicted on herself. It is confronting, uncompromising and also intensely liberating. Gadsby throws off the shame she has carried for so long in front of our eyes.
This rediscovery of the contributions of women has helped us all throw off the sense of innate, inescapable inferiority that so many women of previous generations had to live with, from the disappointment of their birth to their unremembered death. This rediscovery is particularly important for little girls who—just like little boys—need to see achievers they can identify with. After the tradition-shattering royal wedding of Prince Harry, of impeccable royal and aristocratic British pedigree, and mixed-race US descendant of slaves Meghan Markle, I was touched to see an African American mother tweet that her small daughter had turned excitedly to her as she watched the spectacle to exclaim that Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, had ‘hair just like yours’. When human beings see someone who is ‘like’ them doing something unexpected and admirable, it opens up possibilities that did not previously exist. Lifting the veil covering women of the past and what they have achieved is of vital importance for the future of little girls, and that is a legacy to be proud of.
Shaking off false humility or ‘modesty’ is enabling many female writers to re-examine the comprehensive erasure of women and their lives from history. Julia Baird has re-examined the life of Queen Victoria through female eyes. Leslie Cannold was inspired to write her novel The Book of Rachael when she watched a documentary about Jesus Christ in which his brothers were all mentioned by name but the fact he also had sisters was mentioned only in passing. No-one knows their names. Not one of them was deemed important enough to be thought of as an individual. In response, Cannold has imagined Christ’s sisters, giving them names, lives, thoughts and agency. Historian Clare Wright is explicit about the way history has treated the women who participated in the legendary Australian goldminers’ rebellion known as the Eureka Stockade. Her book about them is simply called The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. Virginia Woolf’s famous feminist essay A Room of One’s Own is a meditation on what might have happened if Shakespeare had had an equally brilliant sister (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well). Shakespeare may indeed have had a sister, but how would we ever know? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart certainly had one, and when they were children they toured together as equally brilliant infant prodigies. Mozart’s sister was Maria Anna Mozart, nicknamed Nannerl. She disappeared from her brother’s story (and from any story at all) when she turned eighteen. She did not die, however, but lived another sixty years in anonymity. One hopes she continued to play the piano, if only in private.
In a small way, I have also contributed to this rediscovery of women and their history by writing a series of young adult novels about Elizabeth I (my long-time hero) telling the story of her life in the first person. I wanted to imagine what it might have been like to be her, especially as she is so often seen from the outside and then puzzled over as a lifelong virgin, spinster and female ruler. So odd have these facts appeared to many historians (mostly male) that there has even been speculation that Elizabeth Tudor was not a ‘proper’ woman at all (whatever that is) and may have suffered from a condition called testicular feminisation. There is little (if any) evidence for this, but if something can be used to imply that such a brilliant and independent woman must really have been a man, it seems that it will be—especially, perhaps, because she was so determined never to marry and never to bear children, and so never hand over any of her power.
This rediscovery, re-interpretation and long-overdue recognition does not happen in a vacuum. It is also the legacy of many generations of women—women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who dared to suggest during the French Revolution that women might have rights, as men did. (I sometimes wonder if the reason it was an Englishwoman who articulated the limitations placed on women’s lives during that turbulent time was, in itself, a legacy of Elizabeth I, whose story must have secretly inspired generations of girls into harbouring seditious thoughts, just as it did me.)
Elizabeth Tudor, along with the other female luminaries of her time (there were so many just after the Reformation that fire-and-brimstone Calvinist preacher John Knox christened them a ‘monstrous regiment of women’), such as Mary, Queen of Scots and Catherine de Medici, owned tapestries woven from the illustrations of a book by French late medieval writer Christine de Pizan. The Book of the City of Ladies, written in 1405, is a proto-feminist text (yep, women asserting their rights goes back a lot further than we think) advocating for female education and arguing that women are valuable participants in society. The illustrations that were made into the tapestries are even more revolutionary. They show medievally garbed aristocratic women building walls, poring over architectural drawings, even jointing and planing blocks of wood to create their city. It is wonderful to imagine the women leaders of the time gaining strength and solidarity from owning such tapestries. The tapestries, sadly, have long since disappeared, but we still have the book.
The women who followed de Pizan, the queens and Wollstonecraft grasped the baton and continued the fight for equal rights that goes on to this day. Over the following centuries, women fought for their right to keep their own earnings, and to leave an abusive husband and retain some rights to their children. They fought for the vote and to open up higher education for girls. They fought for women’s right to information about their own bodies and their right to choose when and whether they would have children. They fought for women to be taken seriously. They are all owed a debt. Then there are the women who got opportunities in the two world wars when they performed their patriotic duty and did men’s jobs for the duration and proved—at least to themselves and their daughters—just what women could do. And, as 2018 NAIDOC Week has reminded us, there are the Indigenous women who fought doggedly in the face of endemic racism to keep their families together and hold on to their culture—leaders like Tasmanian Aboriginal elder Truganini; political activist Faith Bandler; activist, writer and intellectual Bobbi Sykes; community worker Mum Shirl; and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal. There are the women of colour who fought slavery and vicious prejudice in the US, such as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, revolutionary Angela Davis, and writer and poet Maya Angelou. Not to mention courageous trans women who claimed their right to dignity and respect in the face of overwhelming odds, like historian and (sublime) writer Jan Morris and tennis champion Renée Richards. There are lesbian women who bravely emerged from the shadows, such as tennis players Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova and one of my new heroes, comedian Hannah Gadsby. And there are the women living with disability who have confronted a society that wanted them to live limited lives on the sidelines, such as US writer and celebrity Helen Keller, Australian comedian and educator Stella Young, and US congress-woman Tammy Duckworth.
Unhappily, despite their grit and determination, for previous generations of women progress remained glacially slow. Entrenched attitudes about female inferiority and the smallness of the feminine ‘sphere’ hardly shifted. It took technology to create the cataclysmic changes my generation have lived through. It always takes technology. Elizabeth I and the monstrous regiment of women were a direct result of the Protestant Reformation, which, in its turn, was a response to the invention of the printing press. The invention—at last—of reliable contraception made the definitive difference. Women were no longer slaves to their biology, and the rapid escalation of female liberation owes everything to that. Hence, perhaps, the strident opposition to abortion, contraception and women’s reproductive rights in general. It’s not babies the anti-abortionists want to save: it’s male control over women. Protesters agitating for the repeal of the draconian anti-abortion amendment in the Irish Constitution (Amendment 8, which had been added in 1983 and gave a foetus the same rights as the woman who carried it, resulting in many women risking their health) chanted: ‘Pro-life, that’s a lie. You don’t care if women die.’ Well, yes, exactly. The sudden escalation of women’s demands for their rights that has happened just in the last few years is also because of a technological innovation. Social media and access to the internet have enabled women to connect with one another and support each other like never before. Women marching in the streets protesting against rape in India, Iranian women breaking the law by taking off their hijabs in public or dancing in the streets, Saudi Arabian women finally winning the right to drive cars, are all given oxygen, support and power via their ability to access social media.
The speed of recent change, however, should not belittle the herculean efforts of the women who have gone before. Every generation builds on the work of the last, and pill or no pill, my generation could not have made the strides they have without all the work done by others. The same is true for future generations, although luckily for them the advancement of women is now snowballing. The legacy of the current crop of women over fifty—the accidental feminists—has given a leg up like no other to their daughters and granddaughters, not least through the #MeToo movement.
In the wake of the tsunami of change demonstrated by #MeToo, some prominent older women, including prominent feminists, have reacted with caution. But I would argue that their reservations make little difference. It is to be expected that all of us have a point beyond which we cannot go, and attitudes and beliefs we have been trained to accept since childhood are hard to drop—particularly, perhaps, as we get older. The contribution of women like Germaine Greer, Margaret Atwood and other feminists who have voiced concerns about #MeToo does not negate the fact that it has happened—not in spite of them, but because of them. The battles they fought and largely won have created the climate where the women of today have the tools and the understanding of patriarchy they need to grab the opportunities presented by social media and run with them. Whether or not some older feminists can cope with the monster they have created is beside the point. Their courage and plain-speaking are the reason why feminism is where it’s at today. What some older women have perhaps missed about this revolution is that it is not ‘sucking it up [‘it’ being sexual harassment at work] and carrying on regardless’ that is courageous. Standing up and objecting to sexist behaviour is what takes real courage. I am not accusing older women of having been cowardly, despite the fact that some of them are rather unhelpfully accusing their younger sisters of ‘fragility’. Older women did not speak up because it would have gained them nothing to do so. The world had not changed enough for such behaviour to be taken seriously. But, thanks to them, it has now. The shift in power that #MeToo demonstrates has happened not least because those women found a way to enter the male world of work and survive in it.
The same is true of the less notable members of this extraordinary generation of women. Whether they have espoused feminism or not, they have lived it. Just as sexism is like asbestos in the walls—something we breathe in without even noticing—so is its opposite. It is almost impossible to have lived through the last five or more decades and not have changed your view on what women are capable of, and what they should or should not aspire to do. Even the most conservative person will have changed in ways they once would have thought impossible. On 13 May 2018 (Mother’s Day), the passengers on an otherwise perfectly unexceptional Alaska Airlines flight erupted in applause when the captain announced that it was the first-ever such flight for the airline to be captained and co-piloted by two African American women. In 2013 I was a passenger on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to Sydney. As we approached the runway to land, the plane encountered severe turbulence and plummeted through the sky. It was terrifying, and two passengers were injured. The pilot expertly handled the situation, and when we landed in Newcastle after being diverted, the passengers and crew erupted into applause. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I learnt that the pilot who had saved our lives was a woman—the only voice we’d heard from the cockpit was that of the male co-pilot, even after the danger had passed. I could not help wondering if she had been concerned that a female voice would not have been as reassuring to some of the already-traumatised passengers as a man’s, and so chose not to speak. Maybe she was just shy, I don’t know, but I do not believe a female pilot would have the same reticence today, even after only five years. Things are changing very quickly.
Every generation leaves a legacy they are unaware of, and the consequences of the battles they fought and the attitudes they passed on continue long after they have gone. This generation, most of whom (unless they were born after 1960) are baby boomers, have been particularly powerful and influential through sheer numbers. They began their assault on gender roles right from the get-go, even if they didn’t quite realise that is what they were doing. They were the generation of unisex, and loud were the complaints from their elders that from the back you couldn’t tell a boy from a girl. One of the clearest and most banal indicators of the blurring of rigid gender lines back in the 1960s and 1970s was the virtual disappearance of barbers and the exponential increase in ‘unisex’ hairdressers. I dare say Vidal Sassoon thought he was simply changing hair fashion, not that he was at the forefront of a gender revolution—but he was. That’s his legacy. (Interesting how the hipster male fashions of today are all about turning young men into elaborately bearded replicas of the Victorian patriarch. Backlash, anyone? Oh, and the barbers are reappearing as well.)
I have never believed that fashion is either trivial or irrelevant (funny how the things women are interested in are so often characterised that way—why isn’t sport, I wonder?). I have always thought it was a symbolic and metaphorical representation of the way the times are changing. I had lunch with my 86-year-old mother the other day in a large shopping mall jam-packed with fashion boutiques. As we watched the passing parade she commented: ‘The thing about modern fashion is you really can wear absolutely anything.’ She is right. Maybe that is one of the legacies of this revolutionary generation too, at least in Western countries: the new belief that diversity is everything, and that you should be, do, wear, love, think, create whatever you want to, including choosing your gender (or lack thereof) and sexuality (or lack thereof).
I cannot help thinking of my infant granddaughter and the legacy that she will inherit. Much of it will be vastly more varied, interesting and exciting than the one my grandmother left to me. Esther will receive at least as good an education as her brother. My grandmother never expected to go to university. That was partly an issue to do to with her class (her husband, my grandfather, didn’t expect to go, either), but almost no uni students were female when she was that age. My mother had to fight for her right to take a degree but I was just expected to go to uni, as were my daughters, and so, no doubt, as will my granddaughter. My grandmother did not expect to work for money after she married, and she didn’t, apart from a stint running my grandfather’s shop when he was drafted during World War II. My mother didn’t expect to either, but eventually she desperately wanted to and—in her forties—built an interesting career as a relationships counsellor. Like most of my generation, I have worked professionally, at least part time, all my life.
The worst legacy my generation has left future generations, of course, is our criminal inaction on climate change—but that is a story for another book. What the politicisation of climate change reveals is another legacy of the revolutionary decades this generation of women have both lived through and influenced—and that is the polarisation of political perspectives across the world, including the West, and the possibility of a backlash. Rights that have been hard won can also be lost.
In the US, where the polarisation between the urban, feminist, cosmopolitan and liberal coasts and the rural, masculinist, parochial and conservative inland seems most stark and belligerent, state after state has rolled back access to abortion. After the momentous win of Roe v. Wade in 1973 (when I was sixteen), US women must have felt that the bad old days of dangerous backyard abortions were over. Today, Texas, which has very draconian abortion laws, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. Backlashes can be fatal, especially for poorer women. Recently, a columnist with the prestigious Atlantic magazine called for the death penalty for women who seek abortions. He was fired, but he is not alone in his view. Many regard abortion as murder, and the logical end point of that belief, if you also believe in capital punishment (funny how many so-called ‘right-to-lifers’ do), is the death penalty for women who end pregnancies. In Australia, where fortunately we no longer have the death penalty, a sitting senator and member of the National Party has nonetheless also voiced extreme views about women who seek to control their own bodies. In July 2017, at a party conference, Senator Barry O’Sullivan spoke in support of Resolution 26 in the Queensland Liberal National Party platform and said this: ‘Many in the party and outside would like to lock [pregnant women] up and bind their arms and say “no abortion could occur”.’
In the US, things may be about to get even worse. In June 2018, US Supreme Court Judge Anthony Kennedy resigned. His departure and the subsequent successful if contested nomination by the Trump administration of an anti-abortion replacement led to furious demonstrations by those worrying about the safety of the Roe v. Wade decision. American women may soon have to face the possibility of backyard abortions again, particularly if they are young, poor women of colour.
Access to safe, legal abortion and other reproductive health services is not just about autonomy and bodily control for women. The number of children women have and the way they can space their pregnancies (or not) have a direct effect on their ability to earn a living, keep themselves and their children out of poverty, and also prepare for their old age. Women once again find themselves caught between contradictory expectations when it comes to conservative ideas of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility—the judgemental stick most commonly used to beat up on the poor—and those same conservatives’ trenchant opposition to safe, legal abortion. How on earth are fertile, sexually active women meant to conform to both?
Given that women in many countries of the world are indeed locked up for the ‘sin’ of having an abortion, or even for having a miscarriage or stillbirth somebody deems suspicious, we must not think for a second that the legacy of the women who have changed everything will always be benign or forward thinking. Their very success can put women in deadly danger. We have already seen women targeted by mass murderers in the US, which is currently in the grip of an epidemic of mass shootings, of which almost all have been carried out by men. One of the few things that link the men who choose to shoot large numbers of people at random is a history of domestic violence. (Another is that almost all of them are white.) They have often beaten and attacked the women in their lives, and it is common for the first victim of a mass shooter to be a woman who is close to them, as at Port Arthur and Sandy Hook.
In the wake of the mass attack in Toronto in April 2018 by a man who claimed to be inspired by an earlier mass murderer (as described in Chapter 6), a few commentators suggested that there ought to be some kind of ‘right to sex’ for men who are less successful at attracting women. Writer Ross Douthat argued in the New York Times that the idea of a redistribution of the right to sex should not necessarily be dismissed as ‘inherently ridiculous’. Well, only if you are not a woman, I guess, who may have to put up with being redistributed (aka raped). The inchoate anger that some men seem to feel towards all women appears to be on the increase, and is finding particularly violent expression in the US. In May 2018, yet another school massacre was perpetrated by a young man who stalked and harassed a young woman because she rejected him romantically. She was one of eight schoolmates and two teachers who he shot and killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas. It is suddenly feeling even more frightening (it’s always been a bit risky) for a woman or girl to reject the overtures of a man. Canadian author Margaret Atwood put it brilliantly: ‘men are afraid women will laugh at them … women are afraid men will kill them’—an observation gaining increasing resonance. I suppose it is soberingly inevitable that as women gain power, a few men will want to take it away from them again by whatever means possible.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 is arguably a direct result of the backlash against the progress women, LGBTQI people and people of colour have made. White, conservative voters simply could not contemplate a female president following a black one. Trump’s campaign slogan directly plugged into that sentiment. ‘Make America Great Again’ was backward looking. It was about returning to a world that was run by white men, where all women knew their place (not just the 52 per cent of white women—who voted at all—who voted for Trump), LGBTQI people were closeted, and people of colour were restricted to menial and domestic labour. The slogan and the president it helped elect are a direct rejection of the legacy of the accidental feminists. No wonder women all over the world were gripped by the TV adaptation of Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. I remember reading the book when it was first published and enjoying it. Even then, the fate of the women in the story didn’t seem that impossible to me. However, the reason it resonates so powerfully now is because the ghastly misogynistic regression it dramatises seems more possible than ever. As Atwood herself has said, everything in the book has happened to some women, somewhere, at some time.
The vitriolic, sexualised abuse that outspoken women experience on social media is another example of the anxiety that has been generated by the rise of the female gender. The statement ‘The more they hate you, the more effective you are being’, while true, can be cold comfort if you are facing a barrage of hate and abuse for simply expressing an opinion. In Australia, outspoken feminists such as Van Badham, Tracey Spicer and Clementine Ford face appalling abuse simply for being articulate and forthright. Morning TV host Yumi Stynes lost her job at The Circle in response to out-of-proportion vitriol about a careless remark, while the behaviour of her male colleague, George Negus, who laughed along with her, raised barely an eyebrow. The 2015 Young Queenslander of the Year and engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied was forced to leave the country, such was the level of insulting commentary aimed at her in response to a pretty unexceptional tweet about Anzac Day. Data analyst and writer Ketan Joshi estimated that after posting her seven-word tweet, Abdel-Magied had 207,979 words written about her, most of them negative. These pile-ons can have serious, real-world effects beyond even the loss of job or country: Abdel-Magied was recently refused entry to the US. Stynes and Abdel-Magied, perhaps not coincidentally, are both non-Anglo Australians—Stynes is of Japanese descent and Abdel-Magied Sudanese—but being white and Aussie offers thin protection if you are female. Female journalists and politicians routinely experience more intense and more gendered abuse than their male colleagues do. Former human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs, former prime minister Julia Gillard, ABC TV journalist and columnist Emma Alberici and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young are all white women who have been subject to intense media campaigns against them.
In a way, the intensity of the backlash is merely a reflection of feminism’s overwhelming progress. The rise of women has generated real fear in some men and, it must be said, some women. Why else would they react so viciously to the—perfectly reasonable—attempts by female gamers to make gaming less misogynistic? Prominent US gamer and feminist campaigner Anita Sarkeesian has had to have police protection as a result of her campaign, and gave up speaking in public for a time. The so-called men’s rights activists routinely use organised onslaughts of abuse and intimidation on social media to attempt to silence women who speak up for their gender. Mary Beard, the venerable and authoritative British academic and expert on ancient Rome (and co-host of Civilisations, at least in Britain) whom I wrote about in Chapter 2, faced unbelievable abuse when she began her later-in-life TV career about her appearance, her ‘arrogance’ at assuming she knew her subject (she is an acknowledged world expert), and her cheeky insouciance. A British woman who merely lobbied to have a woman other than the Queen appear on one denomination of British currency (eventually Jane Austen was chosen) brought a storm of absurd protest down upon her head, most of it personal, abusive and sexualised. Tragically, this is also a legacy of the women who have changed everything. They have helped advance the feminist project considerably, and the feminist project is, of course, nothing less than a redistribution of political, social and financial power more equally between men and women. For women to gain some power, men may have to lose a little—and some of them don’t like that at all.
Nonetheless, I remain cautiously optimistic. I don’t believe half of the human race will ever be as easy to intimidate and control as they once were. Thanks to every generation of women from every culture on earth who ever lived, thanks to every woman who ever voiced a seditious thought or pursued her talents regardless of invisibility, my generation of women have been able to live a life different from the women who came before us. That doesn’t mean every one of us has had a good life, or realised our dreams—of course it doesn’t. Feminism is not a cure-all or a magic wand able to deliver perfect happiness. All it claims to do is give women the same rights as men to decide the shape of their own lives. And, for better or worse, the legacy this generation of women is leaving to the future is about our right to make our own decisions about our own lives.