When the women’s liberation movement declared the “personal is political” the slogan offered insight, rebuke, critique, a mode of analysis and a call to action all at once. It was a demand for recognition that areas of life traditionally deemed personal and private — sexual and family relationships, for instance — were in fact structured by gendered power relations, as Kate Millett memorably argued in her influential 1970 book Sexual Politics.
Feminist theorists also developed a critique of the traditional liberal divide between public and private spheres that underpinned and shaped our understanding of the domains of politics and history. Traditionally understood, politics referred to prime ministers, premiers, parliaments, parties and public policy. History was the record of men’s deeds in public life, in parliaments and parties, in empire and nation-building, in exploring the wilderness and fighting wars. Feminists argued that the conceptual divide between public and private was a disingenuous fiction that served to render women, their lives and work and the oppression they suffered invisible in the past and present.
A new wave of “women’s history” was launched. Archives once assumed to contain only the records of men’s past exploits were found to be rich repositories for exploring women’s experience. Women in Australia: An Annotated Guide to Records, edited by Kay Daniels and funded by International Women’s Year, demonstrated the wide range of historical records, personal and political, held in Australian archives and libraries. In new histories the public and private were intertwined. The personal not only became political, the political was shown to be highly personal, shaped by gendered subjectivities. New work began to explore how nationalism, socialism, liberalism and other political movements were animated by masculine anxieties and desires.
When women’s liberationists declared that the personal was political they were at one level reiterating what feminist activists had long argued: that home and family life, intimate relations and the domestic economy, and sexual coercion and violence rested on and reinforced men’s power and women’s subordination. Since the nineteenth century women had mobilised politically to change gender relations, to empower womanhood, to win the economic independence of women and end the control men exercised over them. “Woman has been a slave too long,” declared Rose Scott. She needed to be freed from the “House of Bondage,” said Louisa Lawson.
When a male royal commissioner in the 1920s expressed incredulity at a feminist’s demand for state payments to mothers, as citizens, to enable them to raise their children while living apart from their husbands, she agreed that “yes,” it was “revolutionary” and “that is what we wish.” From the late nineteenth century personal experience had shaped a radical new gendered politics in the public domain. Women demanded to be autonomous, self-determining, independent and free. Self-sovereignty was the early promise of citizenship.
The 1960s and 1970s saw new critiques of “patriarchy,” “the family,” “male chauvinism,” “sex roles” and “sexism” and new demands for sexual freedom — for sexual liberation, gay liberation and lesbian rights and recognition — sometimes in the context of the women’s liberation movement and sometimes not. Women’s liberation was both an extension of, and protest against, sexual freedom. Critiques of pornography, sexual objectification and rape flourished in the 1970s. Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes and Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch came out in the same year as Sexual Politics. Andrea Dworkin published Woman Hating in 1974 while Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape appeared in 1975. Male power was the focus of these writers; men were conceptualised as the oppressors of women.
There was a yearning for a new order. Women’s liberationists declared Sisterhood is Powerful, longed for revolution, and called for the overthrow of the patriarchal order. But soon there also came more modest claims for an expansion of citizenship rights, such as those advanced by the Women’s Electoral Lobby. As Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Barbara Baird and Robert Reynolds write in their important new political history, Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia, citizenship provided a “powerful master language through which to claim and remake rights.”
From the 1970s these claims were increasingly made in the “languages of gender and sexual identity,” with “identity” offering a new basis on which to demand and define political rights. Identities forged by exclusion and repression began to be deployed by activists who again foregrounded “painful or once-private experiences” to substantiate public demands. In their account of the safe schools movement, the authors suggest that young people’s interactions with the practice of social science were central in “growing the visibility and intelligibility of young transgender people as a new identity in political life.”
Activists campaigning in the name of non-reproductive sex — gay and lesbian — and the refusal of maternity generated, the authors suggest, a new conception of “sexual citizenship.” This notion repudiated earlier conceptions of “maternal citizenship” advanced by feminists from the 1890s through the 1940s in support of women’s economic rights and remuneration. It was the “refusal of reproduction,” the authors suggest, that tied together “the interventions of second-wave feminism and gay and lesbian activism,” a claim that might seem to ignore the central importance of childcare and supporting mothers’ pensions (introduced by the Whitlam government) to the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
The authors’ argument in Personal Politics is advanced through a number of focused case studies, some more compelling than others, some more concerned with traditional gendered grievance than advancing new sexual rights. The most persuasive case studies of sexual citizenship are elaborated in the first chapter, “Liberalising the Law” — which details campaigns for abortion rights and the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, fought on a state by state basis — and in the last chapter on the federal postal vote on marriage equality, when 61 per cent voted to allow same sex-couples to marry. Other chapters examine gendered contests over the Family Law Act, the struggle for funding by women’s refuges and Mardi Gras, health policy activism in relation to HIV/AIDS and abortion, and campaigns for safe schools and men’s sheds.
Funding by the state has long been seen as a validation and right of citizenship in Australia, a legacy of earlier popular ideals of “state socialism.” From the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first a range of different men’s groups have sought state funding. Personal Politics documents the diversity of men’s activism — out and proud gay men seeking to decriminalise homosexual acts, claiming entitlements as “communities” and working productively with the state to ameliorate the effects of HIV/AIDS — alongside disgruntled, aggrieved, heterosexual men railing against the Family Law Act and demanding and winning state support for the dynamic men’s shed movement. As of 2022, we are told, more than 1250 community men’s sheds in Australia were funded within a framework of men’s health policy to ameliorate mental distress and social isolation. Increasingly, citizenship rights and associated state funding have been framed by a discourse on health and wellbeing, encouraged by a neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility for personal “wellness” (and eternal life) as poignantly critiqued by Barbara Ehrenreich in her last book, Natural Causes.
Personal Politics celebrates the achievement of activists forging a new sexual citizenship in Australia. The response to the AIDS epidemic was a “story of activist success with partnership between the gay community and health departments at the centre of government response.” The National Women’s Health Policy was a story of “success, indeed victory… and [along with] the National HIV/AIDS Strategy… deserves to be celebrated.” But the authors caution against simple (and simple-minded) success stories. In constructing their argument they are keen to stress that theirs is a clear-eyed corrective to naive “narratives of progress.”
In remaking citizenship there were setbacks, detours, exclusions and defeats. Some campaigns were more successful than others. Compared to the success of Mardi Gras, so vivid that the festival has succumbed to corporatisation, women’s refuges have done little to stem domestic violence and the terror that men continue to inflict on women and children. Neoliberal reforms have restricted state funding for the refuges. Market logics of competitiveness and efficiency have had adverse effects. Numerous women’s refuges and shelters have closed; others are run by charities.
In attending to the limits of activists’ achievements, Personal Politics draws attention to the simultaneous impact of the neoliberal revolution in shaping modes of fund-raising and governance on the one hand, and creating a more individualistic sense of self attuned to identity, self-responsibility and “wellness” on the other.
As sexual citizenship mobilised identities and communities, class mobilisations became less significant. The authors note the uncanny resonances between neoliberalism and the post-1970s activist project of making the personal political. It was not just the former acting upon the latter. The remaking of citizenship had unintended consequences and Personal Politics points to the ways in which activists themselves became neoliberal subjects as they sought to remake citizenship into a vehicle for claiming individual rather than social or economic rights. Their collective achievements nevertheless had a “transformative impact on Australian political history and the rights and entitlements of citizens.”
Transformative, but still contested. As I write my conclusion, the Albanese government is embroiled in controversy over how to deal with the LGBTQI+ community in the forthcoming census, our key method for counting citizens. To what extent has citizenship been remade? Having initially decided to omit any reference to sexual orientation or transgender identity in the census questions (to avoid divisiveness), the government quickly bowed to fierce protest, including from its own parliamentarians, to announce that there would indeed be questions relating to sexuality and sexual preference.
Sexual citizenship had, it seems, secured proper state recognition. But not yet, apparently, for trans and intersex Australians. While sexual citizenship might have triumphed, gender diversity and fluidity seem to pose too great a political challenge to the calibration of true Australian citizenship. •
Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia
By Leigh Boucher, Barbara Baird, Michelle Arrow and Robert Reynolds | Monash University Publishing | $36.99 | 314 pages
