Foreplay

Some years ago, the Australian Research Council funded research towards a history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. Other projects interrupted what had initially been designed to be a smooth transition from research to writing. However, I am now engaged in writing that history, and, herewith, its beginning. I had expected that my story of the resurgence of feminism in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s would start by linking the origins of Women's Liberation with the sexual revolution that followed from the appearance of the Pill on the mass market in Australia in 1961. But I have now decided that the connection between the Pill, the sexual revolution and Women's Liberation was not so simple. First, the sexual revolution had been brewing for longer than the few years between 1961 and, say, 1968. Second, there were two kinds of uneven development: the Pill did not simply 'appear’ on the mass market: its dissemination occasioned controversy and conflict and took some time; and its distribution was patchy. Let me elaborate, briefly.

Explanations for all manifestations of what has been called the cultural revolution of the West — from the student movement to new concerns with ecology, including the sexual revolution and Women's Liberation — usually have three elements. One is economic growth and an associated expansion of domestic markets as, to quote Stella Lees and June Senyard, ‘Australia became a modern society and everyone got a house and car’. A second is the beginnings of a new communications revolution with the appearance of television. The third is expanding education, especially tertiary education. I have written such explanations myself. Now, I would like to add to that mix two other factors.

One comes from the work of sociologists Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle. Considering the making of the Australian family, focused on sex and the suburban dream, they argued that the 1950s and ‘60s saw not only an expansion of consumption but also its sexualisation, targeted specifically at women. Advertisers, journalists and educators developed and spread the view that women — housewives — were to form love relationships with their homes, to have an emotional investment in the wellbeing of their furnishings.