Happy New Year! 1994, the United Nations International Year of the Family. Isn't it meant to make us feel all warm and gooey inside? Isn't that why special issues of a 50 cent coin and a $5 note are going to be produced?
The family is being heralded - again - as that begetter of harmony, that promoter and provider of stability that (go on, admit it) we all hanker after. The stated aims of the IYF are, among others, to "strengthen families as the basic units of society" and to "promote the family as an income-generating enterprise to encourage the economic stability of families worldwide".
But what about the assumptions behind these aims? What does it mean exactly to promote the family for a year? The issues facing the family in 1994 after all are not very different from those that faced the family in 1993 or for that matter during most of this century - issues such as child-care, violence against women and children, the economic dependence within the family that limits women's choices and prevents them from leading fulfilling and creative lives. If these issues really were to be taken up in the IYF it would be a progressive year indeed.
In the meantime, the promotion of the IYF gives the right a whole year in which to use the family as an ideological prop. As Susan Faludi points out, the New Right has massaged the language of the progressive movement, a popular language, and turned it around on itself. It has renamed its regressive stance against the progress of women's rights as "pro-family", thereby denouncing feminism as "anti-family", the lesbian and gay rights movement as "anti-family", demands for women to be able to control their own bodies as "anti-family" and so on.
We've already heard the murmuring of this ghost as, for example, the Liberal Party uses the rhetoric of defence of the family to attack the federal government for reducing income support to families. Yet the Liberals' policies on industrial relations, social welfare and GST would do nothing to help the average working family member.
The Sydney Telegraph Mirror has even editorialised against the dangers of possible "hijacking" of the IYF by interest groups, pushing the traditional family into the background.
It has been said before that in order to change the conditions of life, we must learn to see them through the eyes of women. Changing demographics mean that today worldwide approximately one out of three households is headed by a woman. Women continue to bear the burden of family life in terms of child-care, unpaid labour, lack of independence and so on. To glorify the family as an entity in itself means very little in this context. In fact, it becomes reactionary.
If the IYF is to mean anything at all, 1994 is going to have to be another year of grassroots activity - around International Women's Day and Reclaim the Night, around the environment and democratic rights, everywhere by and in defence of the interests of those individuals who somehow get lost in the red tape and smokescreens of international declarations - that's most of us.
By Kath Tucker