By Karen Fletcher
US writer Naomi Wolf and former Victorian premier Joan Kirner have recently completed a national tour of their self-styled "Feminist Roadshow" or "Sister Act".
With ticket prices ranging from $45 to $120, the Sydney forum, at the Sydney Town Hall on November 26, had more the feel of an afternoon orchestral concert than a political public meeting. As the afternoon wore on, the atmosphere changed to that of a genteel ALP fundraising function and then again to a US-style motivational seminar, the title of which could have been: "Are you letting your gender get in the way of your success?"
Around 1000 women and a handful of men attended the Sydney "Fire with Fire: The Feminist Forum". Expensively dressed mother and daughter duos predominated. Considering the price of the tickets, and the fact that the date had to be changed (so that Wolf could collect her Woman of the Year award from Glamor magazine in the US) the turnout was impressive. Clearly Wolf's work has appeal.
Certainly her address appealed to this audience. As in her most recent book, ,Fire with Fire, Wolf argued that we are presently at an opportunity for the feminist movement, where equal status for women is there for the taking. Women are now a political majority and a major economic power. Her message is that "we" just have to muster up the confidence to take that power, to overcome "our" internalised fear of power and money and to take "our" place beside men, as equals.
"Use the master's tools", she exhorted at one point, to wild applause, "to dismantle the master's house" and "redistribute the master's Porsches."
Wolf speaks of a world in which women gain equality but everything else remains the same. Just as some men rule, and drive Porsches, so will some women. Just as many men will continue to starve, so will many women.
There is at least one fatal flaw in Wolf's plan, even within her own limited frame of reference: a small number of women have already been admitted to the rich and powerful club, but even they continue to suffer sexism. Margaret Thatcher endured the "iron maiden" tag, and much worse. Joan Kirner, as she mentioned in her speech, was consistently portrayed in the Victorian media as a brainless housefrau in a spotted shift and slippers.
The mechanism which keeps the majority of us in our places in the economic order continues to have an impact in the upper echelons. Unless the majority of women are liberated, even the rich and powerful minority of women will never truly be liberated either. Wolf herself has documented one force in this process in her first book, The Beauty Myth, in which she exposes the role of prescribed norms of female beauty in restricting the attainment of equality even for privileged, educated upper and middle-class women in the First World.
Kirner had even less to offer in the way of a winning strategy for women's liberation. Women's entry into leadership positions in politics and in business, she said, would lead inexorably to true democracy (a proposal with which the rather more hard-headed Wolf did not agree, and upon which Kirner did not elaborate).
The quota system recently agreed to by the ALP national conference should, she said, be extended into the private sector. Indeed, she emphasised, the private sector should be at the top of the women's movement's agenda. She led a round of applause for panel member Ann Sherry's move from the Office of the Status of Women to the boardroom of Westpac Bank.
Finally, Kirner mentioned the plan currently before the ALP National Executive to introduce an Australian version of the US Democrats' fundraising scam: Emily's List (from Early Money Is Like Yeast). In Fire with Fire, Wolf advocates the scheme, by which subscribers donate funds to the election campaigns of female Democratic candidates at all levels of government, as "revolutionary". During her speech she advised us to "get out our notebooks" to write down her "secret of revolution": $6.2 million raised through Emily's List in 1994.
With America's favourite feminist exhorting well-heeled Australian audiences to throw money into the coffers of the ALP, Joan Kirner won't be the only one singing Naomi Wolf's praises. The men of the ALP machine would probably not be averse to humming a few lines of the odd feminist anthem, as long as it keeps the dimes rolling into the ALP jukebox.