Housewife superstars' right to be heard

KEVIN Rudd may have been in office for only about five minutes, relatively speaking, but he should be warned now.

On this 100th anniversary of International Women's Day today, cave feminas. He has committed the mortal public relations sin of gender blindness by inviting only one woman to the steering committee of his 2020 talkfest and she an actor, albeit one described in teeth-grinding magazine speak as "luminous". A Hollywood sheen does not a Mother Teresa-like halo make, even for Cate Blanchett, let alone illuminate the formidable pragmatism required of mortgage-stressed mums pushing trolleys around supermarkets across the country.

Of course the feminists and high-profile professional women are loud in their complaints about his sin of omission, but why? They are not so different from most of the men coming to this jamboree. But at least he hasn't asked any of those professional feminists from the Women's Electoral Lobby who had such clout in the Hawke-Keating governments. Far from making things better, modern feminists made things worse for women. Although women now can work in the public world in the same way as men, feminism failed where women once triumphed in the private world of the home and family.

If you had invited women who had no power, that would have been different. There is a growing army of discontented younger women who look around at the barren, violent, pornographic culture we live in and admit that, aside from turning women into efficient cogs of the great capitalist enterprise, feminism hasn't helped them in their relationships with men: to marry, have children and transmit some idea of the good life to their children.

There are even new groups such as Women's Forum Australia who are looking beyond the old bully girls of feminism. What's more, this week research by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the bastion of elite feminism, confirms we are living in a post-feminist world. But professional feminists want to keep feminism alive. They are scared stiff that governments will wake up to what ordinary trolley pushers already know; feminism is redundant and it does not have the answers to most families' concerns.

It is still considered heresy to declare feminism kaput in some circles. A lecture this week at the Australian National University by Marian Sawer was advertised thus: "Recipes for Revolt: What Made the Women's Movement Move?" Sawer would "draw on her forthcoming history of the Women's Electoral Lobby to explore the anger that fuelled women's revolt in the early 1970s as well as the joy in the struggle and the optimism that the world could be changed for the better". What anger? What joy? What rubbish!

Sawer goes on: "Women were angry because society had overlooked and wasted their skills and talents, marooned them in the suburbs, expected them to spend the most productive part of their lives in housework, and then discounted their views as simply those of 'housewives'."

There you have it. The making of a home denigrated as mere housework and those who do it housewives, human vacuum cleaners wasting their minds on unproductive work, of the house, not the home. In the eyes of women such as Sawer, the service of the family is not and never has been productive.

So what original thinkers could have been invited to better represent women at the conference? Curiously, the women who lack a voice are, according to the same HREOC survey, the women most women admire - their mothers - and not just the employed mother but the ones so despised by the WEL and Sawer. And if you can't invite a sprinkling of them, what about those of us who have stood up for them despite the odium of the pundits of both Left and Right?

There are some astute commentators in this group who are more often than not despised by the sisterhood. First among them is probably Anne Manne, whose book Motherhood spoke to and for so many, even though it was attacked and buried by feminist ideologues.

Like her British counterpart Catherine Hakim, Manne is a bit of a feminist ideological turncoat. However, women know ideology has no place when we talk about the dubious practice of stressful, long day care for infants. Mothers of young children can enter the work force but we have produced a society in which mothers are considered to be doing valuable productive work only if they are also in the paid work force. Whether it is inequitable tax arrangements that penalise single-breadwinner families or government-sponsored maternity leave that omits women who have forgone employment to rear a family, ideologues of the Right and the Left have transformed the care we thought of as the freely given gift of mother love into a commodity called child care.

Aside from equal pay, post-war feminism has not done much for women. Its proponents have taken the credit for what women in the 19th century had already done and what World War II accelerated.

My mother went to university in 1947. She wasn't spurred on by feminism but by her family and ambitious, well-educated nuns (one a brilliant graduate of the Sorbonne), whose ideals of poverty and obedience and, of course, chastity, were comprehensively trashed by the feminists of my generation.

Those feminists told us that our problems would be solved by the contraceptive pill and abortion. But the pill was the best thing men ever invented for men because it ensured women's constant sexual availability and men's abandonment of old ideals of honour, also leading to more abortions. Now the research is telling us Australian women are unable to have the children they want. So women are fed up with feminism. Its legacy is barrenness. Of course, the feminists are not going to tell you that.