In July 2002, the Age published an opinion piece by ABC journalist Virginia Haussegger entitled ‘The sins of our feminist mothers’ accompanied by the blurb that she was exposing the ‘great lie’ of ‘having it all’ feminism. Blaming feminism was nothing new in the pages of the Age. However, in this article Haussegger succinctly put into words what various journalists had been hinting at for decades. She asserted that feminism in Australia was responsible for a host of social and political problems, including the declining birth rate and the idea that an entire generation of women had supposedly found that after obediently following the dictates of their ‘feminist mothers’ that their careers were ‘no longer a challenge’, their single lifestyles were ‘joyless’, and they were ‘childless’, ‘angry’ and ‘miserable’.1

Haussegger’s ire was notable in that ‘having it all’ and getting women into the workplace were presented as the only goals or achievements of over two decades of second-wave feminism in Australia. Haussegger did not attempt to support her statements with historical evidence that this was indeed what feminists had promised. Instead, her personal narrative with its emotive language was presented as emblematic of all young Australian women’s anguish, providing a focus for their anger: feminism.

Haussegger’s article was in fact part of a much broader debate within the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald about the achievements and limits of the women’s liberation movement and feminism in Australia.2 Her article marked a turning point in narratives about feminism. ‘Having it all’, a long-standing cliché used to dismiss women’s achievements and desires, had entered the social and political discourse as a powerful narrative. In this article I trace the way in which this narrative metamorphised in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald from 1980 to the present. It is my argument that this new narrative signalled a loss of actual historical knowledge about feminism and became, within the pages of these newspapers, not only a way of remembering feminism but also a way of dismissing it as a movement that held out promises that could never be kept. Haussegger’s article gave a generation of women the words to voice their discontent. Blaming feminism for women’s unhappiness, a strategy that has historically often been casually deployed, became the central approach to articles about women in the 1990s and 2000s.

Many scholars have explored the relationship between memory and historical knowledge. Paula Hamilton, for instance, has argued that in one way history is simply ‘official memory’, and that there is an ‘essential interdependence between memory and history’.3 Similarly, Peter Burke has argued that neither history nor memory is objective: both are consciously selected, interpreted and distorted; both are ‘socially conditioned’.4 Ann Curthoys has argued that as time passes the historicity of social events is lost. Over time, our only access to past events becomes an amalgam of ‘personal memory with popular and academic imagination’; we no longer remember the event but only its visual and narrative representation in the public sphere.5 Similarly, Bain Attwood has argued that as the gap between an event and its telling grows, popular explanations inevitably gain precedence over the work of historians, and in the process of ‘narrative accrual’6 the complexity of the past is lost.7 It is for these reasons that many scholars, although acknowledging the usefulness of memory for reconstructing the past (particularly in understanding the construction of social identity) insist on the primacy of the historical account. Public narratives, Attwood argues, should not replace historical knowledge because of the inherent unreliability of memory. This does not mean that memory should be abandoned but, instead, always approached with care.8 This article will submit the memory or narrative of ‘having it all’ feminism to a historical analysis, not in order to present an alternative more ‘accurate’ account of the past but, rather, to explore the complicated relationship between memory and historical knowledge.

The conceptual framework for this analysis draws on Bain Attwood’s study of the ‘stolen generations narrative’, where he outlines three prerequisites for new historical narratives (or collective memories) to emerge.9 First, he argued, there has to exist authoritative figures ‘who offer conceptual and moral frameworks that interpret the past in new ways’; second, there must exist a group of ‘vulnerable or embattled people’ who are attracted by narratives that explain their plight; and, lastly, there must be ‘political and cultural environments’ that enable particular narratives to reach a large number of people.10 All three prerequisites arose over the 1990s and 2000s, enabling the ‘blaming feminism’ narrative to emerge. Like the stolen generations narrative, ‘having it all’ became a ‘truth claim’ about feminism in Australia, and it has shaped both public and private remembering. The promise of ‘having it all’ and the attendant figure of the ‘superwoman’ have a long history prior to their deployment in the Age and the the Sydney Morning Herald. Their genesis can be found in a broad range of texts, from Shirley Conran’s original Superwoman books to commercial women’s magazines. The ‘having it all’ cliché had also been associated with feminism in earlier periods. However, because of the success of second-wave feminism in enlarging women’s access to the workplace, ‘having it all’ took on different emphases in the decades following the women’s liberation movement.

‘Having it all’ was the promise that women could take on the role of ‘career woman’ (never just ‘worker’) without having to sacrifice either their femininity (they could still wear a skirt to the office and still be taken seriously) or their desire to have children (who could be fitted in between promotions and cared for by other ‘child carers’ — never by their father). The idea was that women, no longer confined to domesticity, could simply take on the new roles opened up to them by feminism without relinquishing their old ones, and by working hard and organising well, women could have the ultimate trifecta of career, children and marriage, and retain their femininity, their primary role as mothers, their feminist belief in the equality of women, and their right to economic and social independence.

Although a reading of feminist writings from the period 1970–1980 suggests that this idea was more ‘at home’ in women’s magazines than in feminist discourse (which always emphasised the necessity for structural change) toward the late 1980s, at the very time women’s activism dissipated, the promise of ‘having it all’ began to be associated with the promise of second-wave feminism. The fact that the feminist critique was premised on the belief that women could not ‘have it all’, and indeed identified overwork as a key factor in women’s oppression, had been forgotten. So too had the fact that ‘having it all’ implies a choice that workingclass women have never had. Working-class women have always combined children, housework, marriage and work, but have never considered themselves as ‘having it all’; rather, they see themselves as ‘doing it all’.11

Although a significant demand of second-wave feminism in Australia was to improve ‘female access to the traditional male rewards’ of the workplace,12 the influence of international Marxist feminist theorists13 and those feminists who took up their work in Australia14 meant that it was realised very early that women’s liberation would never come ‘through integration into the public/masculine economy as the equivalents of men’. Rather, women would be liberated when men were integrated into ‘the space that women’s work already occupie[d]’; that is, when men, too, were responsible for childrearing and housework.15 ‘Having it all’, early Australian feminist theory suggested, was not the solution but the problem. Women’s ‘liberation’ was so named because it did not see its goal as ‘equality’ (which the ‘having it all’ ideology implies) but the liberation of all people — men, women and children — from the structures of society that limited their expression and opportunities to pre-defined ‘roles’ determined by gender.16

How women’s liberation became ‘feminism’ (a label many women’s liberationists rejected) with the limited goal of equality is a complex story with many determinants, such as changes to the labour market, the ascendancy of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, the integration of women into government and the bureaucracy, and the handful of businesswomen who climbed the corporate ladder. Susan Magery argues that the ascendancy of the ‘hegemony of liberal feminism’ was assured with the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984. She argues that the movement’s engagement with, and reliance on, the state was cemented, and the more socialist and anarchist dimensions of feminist politics lost their ‘political presence and traction’.17 The new brand of feminism to emerge after the flourish of women’s liberation in the 1970s had a distinctly liberal vision and readily expressed demands for childcare, equal employment and education, and free and safe abortion.18 The more radical section of the women’s movement, which lobbied for changes to the private as well as the public sphere, lost its discursive power; as a new generation women rose through the ranks of the workplace in the 1980s and 1990s, the only feminism they encountered was of the bureaucratic or ‘equal opportunity’ kind. Success was increasingly defined in masculine terms, and ‘having’ or ‘doing’ it all became the only path to success, as it became increasingly evident that women remained primarily responsible for housework and childrearing regardless of how much they worked outside the home.19 Feminists, it seemed, had been successful in opening up the public sphere to women, but the private sphere remained out of bounds for men. So ‘having it all’ became the much reduced and distorted message of feminism, while the revolutionary vision of women’s liberation and the socialist goal of restructuring society were lost.

The ascendancy of the narrative that blamed feminism can be contextualised within the historical relationship between the mass media and feminism. Since its emergence, feminism has concerned itself with the way in which women are represented in the public sphere.20 While early women’s liberationists attacked the media for its narrow definition of women’s role21 and argued for more ‘realistic’ images of women, contemporary feminist theory has moved from an ideological approach to an understanding of textual subjectivity; it has attempted to not just criticise the media but also to understand how it works in the formation of feminine identity.22 Although feminist theory, through an engagement with the notions of agency and desire, has attempted to create a more complex relationship with the media, there is still a concern that normative and sexist images of women are routinely presented, and that feminists themselves are portrayed as subversive and unfeminine.23 The mass media stereotypes and clichés, its images of the ‘militant’, the ‘aggressive’, the ‘man-hating lesbian’, the ‘superwoman having it all’, have long been utilised by an industry that has most often been hostile to feminist politics. As Liz Porter and Eva Cox have argued, the ‘“superwoman” image was, from the beginning to end, a media construct’ and, just like the cliché of ‘bra-burning’, was a way of making fun of feminism and dismissing its concerns.24

In the 1980s the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald played a significant role in the conflation of the ‘superwoman having it all’ narrative and feminism, though they did so in slightly different ways. In ‘Accent Age’ — the ‘women’s page’— which ran from 1966 to the mid-nineties, the image of the superwoman and the idea of ‘having it all’ were treated with humour and derision.25 For most of the 1980s ‘Accent Age’ was informed by feminist theory and criticism, and there was much awareness of the need for structural change in order that women might take up their ‘equal opportunities’. Aconstant thread running through early articles was a feminist critique of current social arrangements. By exposing the hardship of bearing a ‘double load’, ‘Accent Age’ writers were critiquing the myth of the superwoman in feminist terms, rather than championing it as central to the feminist project.26

The Sydney Morning Herald did not have an equivalent to ‘Accent Age’. Instead, stories about women were slotted into ‘Tempo’, the Sunday social and lifestyle pages, or in the Thursday ‘Life and Home’ section.27 The Sydney Morning Herald journalists appeared to have an ambivalent relationship to both feminism and the concept of the superwoman; they celebrated the lives of women who fitted the superwoman mould while simultaneously lamenting and drawing attention to the plight of working mothers. Unlike ‘Accent Age’, however, the Sydney Morning Herald was devoid of any feminist analysis; when feminism was mentioned at all, it was usually in the same breath as ‘bra-burning’ or a cursory mention of the antics of Germaine Greer.28

What is significant about these early articles is the diversity of their perspectives, with some journalists treating the figure of the superwoman with humour and others submitting her to a feminist analysis. ‘Having it all’ had not yet become a collective narrative about feminism, and journalists still offered diverse approaches to the subject. Attwood (using Jerome Bruner’s term) calls this the ‘narrative accrual’29 stage in the creation of new historical narratives, when historical knowledge has not yet been taken over by collective memory. However, a number of social and political changes occurred in the early 1990s, which saw a shift from a diversity of understanding to homogeneity, as the story of feminists espousing the ‘having it all’ thesis was removed from historical experience and became the product of memory alone.

In the 1990s three major social and political events assisted in the consolidation of the new historical narrative of ‘having it all’ feminism. The first was the dissipation of feminist activism and energy in the 1990s, which was precipitated by changes to the economy, a change of government and, ironically, women’s growing engagement in the workplace. The second was the increasing rate of childlessness and discontent among women who were seen to be the ‘beneficiaries of feminism’. This was related to the third event: the intergenerational ‘debate’ between feminists themselves. All events influenced the way the ‘having it all’ narrative took shape and, indeed, were essential to its creation.

Between the late 1980s and 1995 there was a fragmentation of the active women’s liberation movement, which began to splinter into specialist groups or dissipate altogether. By the end of the 1980s the ‘period of monolithic feminist positions’ had receded.30 Many feminists, prompted by criticisms of their white, middle-class and heterosexual bias, moved their focus away from structural change (which, it was argued, had only benefited a limited number of women anyway) toward theoretical and ideological issues about the inclusiveness and/or oppression of feminist discourse itself.31 These changes within feminism coincided with changes in the economy and, in 1996, a change of federal government, which saw the gradual rollback of the many achievements of feminism, particularly in the areas of pay rates and childcare, making it more difficult than ever for women to combine a full-time career with mothering.32

It is no surprise, then, that as ‘Gen-X’ women (those born in the 1960s and 1970s) hit childbearing age and, after many years of a successful career, discovered that combining well-paid full-time work with mothering was difficult, they looked for someone to blame. The fact that they blamed feminists rather than the government or a ‘patriarchal society’, however, demonstrated how powerful the ‘having it all’ narrative had become. The intergenerational ‘battle’ between older and younger feminists that followed was not so much about the merits of feminism as it was about, in Attwood’s terms, a ‘vulnerable or embattled’ group’s need for a narrative that explained their plight.

Two events spearheaded the younger generations’ criticism of 1970s feminism. The first was the publication of Helen Garner’s account of the Ormond College Affair, The First Stone, in 1995, where Garner accused the young women involved of ‘puritanical feminism’ and a whole generation of younger women of betraying their feminist heritage.33 The second was Anne Summers’s questioning of what she perceived as the ‘inactivity’ and ‘inarticulateness’ of the younger generation of women in a special edition of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ section, of which she was then editor. Her call for the new generation to ‘get started’ prompted the largest amount of mail ever received by the ‘Good Weekend’, mostly from young women outraged that feminists of Summers’s generation were blind to the plight of their much more complicated lives.34 Two Gen-X women, Kathy Bail and Virginia Trioli, responded to Summers’s and Garner’s accusations with books of their own, where they defended young women and insisted that although their style of activism and the issues they faced were different, feminism was alive and well in the younger generation.35

Bail’s and Trioli’s books were, however, only a small part of the much bigger debate that followed in the pages of the Age and the the Sydney Morning Herald concerning the question of the younger generation not wearing the feminist mantle. The space had now opened for a furore of criticism from thirty-something women who felt let down by older feminists. It is too simple, however, to see these arguments as a simple ‘generational’ debate or a ‘squabble’ between feminists. What occurred in the 1990s, I believe, was that as the history of Australian feminism was forgotten or lost, a new generation of women began to draw on accounts of the past that were expressed in the writings and images of popular culture (such as newspapers), rather than drawing on historical texts.36

Afurther probing into the merits of second-wave feminism was precipitated by the publication of Jan Bowen’s collection of interviews with ‘young’ and ‘old’ feminists in 1998.37 This publication prompted the Age journalist Karen Kissane to question the goals of 1970s feminism, which, according to her, had ‘propelled many women out of the home and … into work or study’. Kissane argued that the message of Bowen’s book was that the younger generation of women were doing it ‘tough’ in their quest to ‘have it all’; they had expected it to be easy and were adamant that this was the feminist legacy.38

The publication of another book in 1998, Natasha Walter’s The New Feminism,39 also fanned the fires of the intergenerational debate. According to Sydney Morning Herald journalist Anne McElvoy, Walter’s book was just a continuation of the flawed feminist promise that women could ‘have it all’ — the truth is that ‘you can’t’, McElvoy argued, and because feminists had glorified work and denigrated motherhood, young women were now in a miserable position.40 This article gave fellow Sydney Morning Herald journalist Ali Gripper the courage to come forward and ‘confess’ that feminism had ‘got it wrong’. She claimed that like many women of her age, although she had pursued a career like a good feminist, she had ‘a secret desire’ to be a full-time mother, a desire she felt feminism had denied her.41 Less than a year later, this tendency to blame feminism for the difficulties of the present generation was continued by the Sydney Morning Herald and Age journalist Cathy Sherry, who argued that although feminists had given women choice, they had not given them the means to enact their choices; and as a result of their ‘anti-child legacy’ many women were delaying childbirth and then facing the agony of age-related infertility.42

However, it was around this issue of combining motherhood with full-time employment — the means to ‘have it all’ — that the imperative to blame feminism really took hold. There were some responses to Sherry’s accusations. For example, Sian Prior countered that women delayed childbirth not because feminists told them to but because they had learnt the hard way that life for working mothers was extremely difficult.43 Marilyn Lake, writing in defence of feminism in the Sydney Morning Herald, concurred that younger women’s lives were harder, although what was needed was not finger-pointing at feminism but a return to its basic demands.44 However, Sherry’s stance was supported by Leslie Cannold, a student and author, who less than a month later argued in the Age that although older feminists might not be responsible for the difficulties facing young women, they must listen to their concerns and help them in their struggles.45 Cannold’s assertion was echoed in an article by Peter Ellingsen about PhD graduate Fiona Stewart who, he claimed, like ‘many well-educated women in their early 30s [had discovered that] the sisterhood got it wrong’. Ellingsen argued that feminists in the 1970s promised women that they could achieve anything, but many thirtysomething women like Stewart had found that the workplace was still hostile to women, particularly mothers. Younger women, Stewart asserted, were ‘feeling a bit betrayed by the rhetoric of feminis[ts]’, whom they believed ignored the problem of combining work with motherhood after achieving success themselves.46

This article generated some angry responses from both younger and older feminists who disagreed with Cannold’s, Sherry’s and Stewart’s assertions. Karen Kissane suggested that Stewart and other angry Gen-X women must have gotten their feminism ‘out of a Weeties’ packet’, because the feminism she learnt never promised that women could ‘have it all’. Feminists, she argued, had always tried to create a fairer balance between work and family, and it was the failure of society to accommodate feminism that was to blame, not feminism itself.47 Fiona Stewart then tried to ‘set the record straight’ by saying that no one was saying feminists were to blame, rather that Gen-X women like herself just wanted an explanation for why everything had ‘gone so wrong’. She insisted that she had been told that ‘the sky [was] the limit’ and she wanted answers for why this wasn’t so — answers, she argued, that older feminists were not providing.48 Again Liz Porter replied on older feminists’ behalf. The message, she said, was never ‘you can have it all’, but that ‘girls can do anything’. The ‘superwoman’ image, she continued, was always just ‘a media construct’, a result of ‘the journalistic urge to make heroes’. It was the media, not feminists, she concluded, who were to blame.49

However, although some continued to defend feminism and the Age attempted to conciliate by setting up a meeting between Fiona Stewart and Moira Rayner — feminists from opposite sides of the alleged generational divide50 — the growing concern about childlessness among Gen-X women and the evolving family/work balance debate in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant that the feminist critique eventually lost ground. By 2000 many journalists were asserting that feminism had created a generation of working mothers who were ‘living on the fringes of their child’s day’ and missing out on the joy that was stay-at-home motherhood.51 More and more young women were coming out in motherhood’s defence to criticise feminism for ‘downgrading mothering’ and instead elevating the joys of the workplace.52

By 2002 feminism was being blamed not only for the difficulties young women faced but also for not providing solutions to those problems, as if the whole 1970s feminist project had never existed. Writing in 2002, the Age journalist Anne Manne blamed feminists for the fact that many high-achieving women would never have children because they had not been adequately warned of ‘the perils of … postponing children in favour of careers’. Feminists, she argued, had told young women they could ‘have it all’, and the younger generation now found themselves successful but childless.53 Cathy Sherry echoed Manne’s concerns in the Sydney Morning Herald, stating that because 1980s feminists overemphasised the world of work, many women had delayed pregnancy and were now facing the prospect of missing out on ‘the main game’, which — according to her — would always be raising children.54 What is interesting about Manne’s article in this case is the solution she offered for this worldwide catastrophe. What Australia needed, she argued, was the European solution of workplace flexibility, better part-time work opportunities and more attention to work re-entry after childbirth. What Manne failed to realise, however, is that such measures were exactly what feminist activists had proposed three decades earlier, and were still proposing in the 1990s and 2000s.55

This loss of historical understanding was also evident in Corrie Perkin’s article in September of the same year. In a series of interviews with young women she called ‘Germaine’s Daughters’, Perkins argued that the failure of feminism was that it pressured for changes to the workplace without creating changes in the home. Women, Perkins argued, had simply been encouraged by feminism to take on paid jobs while still remaining responsible for family duties, leaving them tired and ‘burnt out’.56 Similarly, Margaret Rice argued in the Sydney Morning Herald in April of 2002 that by telling women ‘they could do anything’, women had grown up believing that their potential was ‘limitless’ and they were now finding that what feminism had promised them was not in fact true; in pursuing the feminist dream of career success they had sacrificed their chance to have children.57 By 2002, this story had become both collective memory and code for the failure of feminism and the grief of Gen-X women.

It was Virginia Haussegger’s article in the Age in July 2002 that provided the final pre-requisite for the creation of the historical narrative of ‘having it all’ feminism. It was Haussegger’s personal story of bitterness and grief that provided the ‘conceptual and moral framework’ to interpret the past in new ways. Her despair at idolising her ‘feminist foremothers’ only to discover that ‘you-canhave- it-all’ was a ‘super lie’; her humiliation at hearing her doctor tell her that she ‘had left her run [to have children] too late’; her anger that successful women like Anne Summers and Wendy McCarthy had not told her about her biological clock: her lament spoke to a generation of women who, as Attwood argued of the stolen generation, desperately needed a cultural narrative to satisfactorily explain their plight.58 Although some authors such as Pamela Bone and Jennifer Sinclair refuted Haussegger’s position,59 the shift in narrative was complete. Articles that attempted to ground their narratives in historical sources for accuracy’s sake appeared less frequently, and most stories about women or feminism in the the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald began to be conceptualised within Haussegger’s narrative of anger and despair.

In articles about the Howard Government’s ‘family assistance package’ and the Labor Party’s paid maternity leave scheme in late 2002 and early 2003, the accepted line by conservative journalists, such as Anne Manne and Angela Shanahan, was that all most women have ever wanted is to remain at home to raise their children. Feminists, Shanahan argued in March 2003, were out of touch with ‘real’ women, who didn’t, in fact, want to ‘have it all’. All most women have ever wanted, she asserted, is a satisfactory family life and perhaps a part-time job after their children reached school age.60 Bettina Ardnt, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, argued that what was needed was not support for ‘affluent’ working women but more support for ‘homemakers’ and the many women who would prefer to ‘take time out’ to have children.61

Haussegger consolidated her accusations in two more articles in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003, again blaming feminists for the anguish she and other women faced as they found themselves nearing forty, childless, sometimes partnerless and ‘wondering what the hell went wrong’. What went wrong, she suggested, was that feminism had got it wrong: ‘having it all’ was not possible and now women of her generation were paying the price for feminism’s mistakes.62 Once again, Haussegger’s articles were followed by a number of refutations, including one by Sarah Maddison, who accused Haussegger of perpetuating a conservative notion that feminism was anti-motherhood when in fact feminists had struggled for a world in which ‘women and men are able to choose when to have children and how best to combine work and family’.63 However, by this stage the narrative of ‘having it all’ had satisfied a demand and became the dominant narrative of feminism in Australia.

By the end of 2003 the work/family divide had become a national issue, with Prime Minister Howard calling it a ‘barbeque stopper’. The fact that feminists had been addressing this issue for decades was long forgotten, and the issue was conceptualised as a new problem in need of new solutions. Anne Manne called for a new ‘Australian Settlement’ that would allow women to combine work with childrearing more easily.64 Other journalists toyed with the idea of getting fathers and men involved in the work/family debate and accused feminists of not involving men in the issues of childcare and housework in the first place.65 ‘Equal parenting’ became the new catch-cry for Catherine Lumby, a young feminist author who wrote in February 2004 that what was needed was not for women to ‘have it all’ but for a change of attitude and work culture to give men as well as women the responsibility for juggling work and childcare.66 Although Lumby was not blaming feminism, the fact that she seemed to think her suggestion of ‘equal parenting’ was new shows just how successful the new narrative about feminism had become in obscuring or representing knowledge about the past. Getting fathers involved in childcare and housework was precisely what feminists had been arguing for decades;67 it was just that the new story, which demonised feminism, had effectively silenced their voices. No one was asking why the feminist project of incorporating men and women into both paid and unpaid work had not succeeded; no one was seeking historical explanation.

This loss of history has had implications for both feminism and for the ‘nature of historical knowledge’, and it has raised important questions about the relationship between memory and history.68 This re-remembering or re-presenting of the past has obscured the historicity of feminism in Australia, as well as its diversity and complexity. Reducing two decades of feminist struggle to the simple promise of ‘having it all’ degrades the movement and leaves it open to ridicule, allowing other more conservative interpretations of the past to take hold. If the plethora of feminist achievement is reduced to simply getting women into the workforce, the myriad ways feminism has benefited many women’s lives is forgotten and feminism is reduced to a selfish grab for money and status. It was not feminist discourse that said women should find total fulfillment in the workplace or promised that women could or should ‘have it all’. The narrative of ‘having it all’ feminism merely became convenient in the late 1990s and 2000s for a handful of Gen-X women who felt angry and frustrated at the fact that they still live in a society whose structures are built around the needs and lives of men with stay-at-home wives.

Equating feminism with the promise of ‘having it all’ emerged at a particular historical moment when, for various reasons, feminist discourse and activism were at their weakest and a new generation of women drew on popular representations of feminism, rather than on historical research, in order to explain their plight. As many historians have pointed out, memories cannot be read as accurate reflections of history but must be studied as ‘murky texts that require sophisticated techniques of reading before they can be said to reveal a past reality or yield insights into it’.69 The narrative of ‘having it all’, like all social and collective memories, served a particular social and political purpose. Perpetuating the narrative of ‘having it all’ feminism may make for great copy in the pages of newspapers that feed on controversy, but it does nothing for the millions of women who struggle daily in a society that still makes combining a career with family heavy work.

Notes

1 Age, 23 July 2002, p 11.
2 I will be using the terms ‘the women’s liberation movement’ and ‘feminism’ to refer to secondwave feminism in Australia.
3 P Hamilton, ‘The knife edge: Debates about memory and history’ in K Darian-Smith and P Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp 13–26.
4 P Burke, ‘History as social memory’ in T Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p 98.
5 A Curthoys, ‘“Vietnam”: Public memory of an anti-war movement’ in Darian-Smith and Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp 113–15.
6 This is Jerome Bruner’s term; J Bruner, ‘The narrative construction of reality’, Critical Inquiry, vol 18, no 1, Autumn 1991, p 19.
7 B Attwood, ‘Learning about the truth: The stolen generation’s narrative’ in B Attwood and F Magowan (eds), Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 2001, p 183.
8 ibid., p 211.
9 ibid., p 189.
10 ibid., p 183.
11 M Lake, ‘A question of time’ in D McKnight (ed.), Moving Left?: The Future of Socialism in Australia, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1986.
12 D H Broom (ed.), Unfinished Business: Social Justice for Women in Australia, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1984, p xx.
13 For instance, Juliet Mitchell, Michele Barret and Mary O’Brien.
14 A Curthoys, ‘The sexual division of labour: Theoretical arguments’ in N Grieve and A Burns (eds), Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp 319–39; Lake, op. cit.
15 J J Matthews, ‘Deconstructing the masculine universe: the case of women’s work’ in Women and Labour Publications Collective, All Her Labours, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1984, p 15.
16 A Summers, Ducks on the Pond: An Autobiography, Penguin, Ringwood , 1999, pp 263–5.
17 S Magery, ‘The Sex Discrimination Act 1984’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol 20, June 2004, pp 127, 133.
18 M Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Feminism in Australia, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1999, p 254.
19 Office of the Status of Women, Selected Findings from Juggling Time: How Australian Families Use Time, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, 1991.
20 R Betterton (ed.), Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, Pandora, London, 1987.
21 Lake, Getting Equal, op. cit., pp 222–4.
22 S Sheridan, ‘Reading the Women’s Weekly: Feminism, femininity and popular culture’ in B Caine and R Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1995, pp 88–9.
23 K Pritchard Hughes, ‘Feminism for beginners’ in K Pritchard Hughes (ed.), Contemporary Australian Feminism 2, Longman, Melbourne, 1997, p 2.
24 Age, 18 July 1999, p 21; Interview with Eva Cox, 20 July 2004.
25 Age, 30 March 1988, p 22.
26 ibid., 25 September 1987, p 16; 13 November 1987, p 23; 26 November 1980.
27 Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 1983, p 22.
28 ibid., 18 March 1982, p 17; 25 March 1984, pp 128–9; 24 May 1987, p 128.
29 Attwood, op. cit., p 200.
30 N Grieve and A Burns (eds), Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, p 2.
31 Lake, Getting Equal, op. cit., pp 274–6.
32 I Castles, Women in Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 1994.
33 H Garner, The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power, Picador, Sydney, 1995.
34 Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1995, p 22.
35 K Bail (ed.), DIY Feminism, Allen and Unwin, St.Leonards, 1996; V Trioli, Generation F: Sex Power and the Young Feminist, Mirneva, Melbourne, 1996.
36 K Darian-Smith, ‘War stories: Remembering the Australian home front during the Second World War’ in Darian-Smith and Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; A Curthoys, ‘Vietnam’ in Darian-Smith and Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994.
37 Jan Bowen, Feminists Fatale: The Changing Face of Australian Feminism, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1998.
38 Age, 27 May 1998, p 14.
39 N Walter, The New Feminism, Little Brown, London, 1998.
40 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 February 1998, p 17.
41 ibid., 25 March 1998, p 2.
42 Age, 28 January 1999, p 15; Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1999, p 15.
43 ibid., 14 May 1999, p 15.
44 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October 1999, p 17.
45 Age, 11 June 1999, p 15.
46 ibid., 3 July 1999, p 16.
47 ibid., 8 August 1999, p 22.
48 ibid.,12 July 1999, p 15.
49 ibid., 18 July 1999, p 21.
50 ibid., 8 August 1999, p 22.
51 ibid., 18 March 2001, p 13; 28 April 2001, p 7.
52 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 2000, p 15.
53 Age,1 June 2002, p 1.
54 Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 2002, p 15.
55 For instance, A Edwards and S Magery (eds), Women in a Restructuring Australia: Work and Welfare, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1995.
56 Age, 15 September 2002, p 1.
57 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April 2003, p 11.
58 Age, 23 July 2002, p11.
59 ibid., 8 June 2002, p 7; 25 July 2002, p 13.
60 ibid., 21 December 2002, p 7; 11 March 2003, p 13.
61 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 August 2002, p 15.
62 Age, 23 April 2003, p 15.
63 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 2003, p 17.
64 Age, 27 August 2003, p 13; 8 November 2003, p 1.
65 ibid., 27 August 2003, p 13; 9 December 2003, p 11.
66 ibid., 14 February 2004, p 11.
67 Lake, ‘A question of time’, op. cit.; Edwards and Magery, op. cit.
68 Attwood, op. cit., p184.
69 ibid., p 211.


Originally published in Backburning: Journal of Australian Studies no 84, Helen Addison-Smith, An Nguyen and Denise Tallis (eds), Perth, API Network, 2005.