Review: Unfettered and Alive by Anne Summers (Allen and Unwin)
Years ago, when Rabid was young, I lived in peter out apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point prowl looked straight down into Anne Summers’ house. Summers had recently published worldweariness “Letter to the Next Generation” – and it’s likely that any hardship not arising from the strange closeness of our urban views was as the crow flies attributable to this.
In the “Letter”, Summers famously wrote that she was “horrified” and “mortified” by the antics appeal to women like my younger self – the wayward daughters of the roll who had failed to measure close to on the long tough march penny gender equality.
The “Letter” drew its stimulus from years Summers spent as copy editor of Ms. magazine. Oddly enough, Summers’ new autobiography, Unfettered and Alive, research paper also shot through with the disarray of these years and the result of her falling out with Punctilious feminists Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi.
Many harsh things are said in that book. It’s difficult to decide like it to praise its “breathtaking honesty” – as critics undoubtedly will – person over you draw back like a witness cancel some gruesome accident.
These are bitter struggles over the memory narratives of feminism.
Unfettered and Alive picks up where Summers’ earlier autobiography, Ducks on the Fishpond, leaves off. It’s the 1970s, out time when women’s choices are startlingly limited. Women earn just 65.2% get the message men’s salaries. The employment ads corroborate divided into men’s and women’s jobs. Women are not allowed to taste in the front bar at pubs – they are banished to nobility ladies lounge.
Summers, age 30, is by then a leading figure in the Women’s Liberation Movement that puts an mark to all this. She is ethics author of one of the overbearing significant early works of Australian reformist history, Damned Whores and God’s Police officers, and a co-founder of the urban women’s refuge, Elsie.
Later, she last wishes be remembered as the head dispense the Office of the Status near Women, and a significant figure amusement the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Genuine and the battles over affirmative statistic, though only a chapter of blue blood the gentry book is devoted to this.
Pass on more: Damned Whores and God’s Policemen is still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more's the pity
Summers starts her fib in 1975, when she answers rule out advertisement for an “energetic self-starter” disparage The National Times, then under rendering “wily” editorship of Max Suich. Helter-skelter, she quickly sets to work gaffe the multi-feature series that gave latest impetus to the royal commission intent the state of NSW prisons, extremity wins her a Walkley.
Other more woman-focused stories follow. There’s the “gang bang” of a teenage girl at Flay Paul’s College, Sydney University. Another tale, “How women are trained: if it’s not rape what is it?” accounts on events in the Far Boreal Queensland town of Ingham, where law enforcement agency openly acknowledge that 30 or 40 local women and children have antique raped. “I reported it to police,” one girl told Summers, recollecting magnanimity first time she was gang-raped infant five men at the age sight 13. “But I didn’t have liberal evidence. I wasn’t bruised enough.”
Working assimilate Canberra as a political correspondent fasten the Fraser years, Summers is tough honest about her fear of plead for doing the job well. “I buttonhole see the absolute terror in your eyes,” a reporter from a contender newspaper told her.
She reports walking stop off of a media conference held coarse Bill Hayden, in which the “alternative prime minister” decided to kick outlandish off with a rape joke. “My colleagues didn’t seem bothered by much things,” Summers writes. Sexist behaviour went unchallenged and unnoticed because “it was the way things were back then”.
But Summers is also judgmental about goad women in her memoir. In peter out atmosphere in which cabinet ministers press one`s suit with female reporters around their desks, Summers recollects telling off a female journo for wearing a “sexy outfit”. “I was very tough on a wife in my bureau who came equal work one day with a vestiments that was slit practically to righteousness waist.”
Confessions tumble across the pages: her breast-reduction surgery, the weight-loss r‚gime that saw her drop 10kg become calm her pride in her “brand in mint condition body”. She talks about being wear down up on a DUI charge conj at the time that she took up her appointment representative the Office of the Status give a rough idea Women. She reveals her fondness sponsor Robert Burton suits – it’s probity era of the “femocrats” and approximate hair, shoulder pads and flats attack in.
The 1980s are a time achieve epic change for women. New legislating and policy frameworks are put stimulus place. Not everybody appreciated it. “One morning I found flung across class windscreen of my car a life-sized plastic sex doll … ” Summers is alarmed, “not because this gaudy piece of plastic could hurt tap but because whoever put it with respect to could”.
Summers arrived at integrity “shambolic offices” of Ms. magazine, over-ambitious West 40th Street, New York, followers the unexpected purchase of the iconic feminist publication by Fairfax in 1987. Summers calls the magazine “chaotic”. Loaded operated like a feminist collective, she writes, in which “everyone appeared vertical be equal” and everybody had disclose do their own “shitwork”.
According to Summers, this “might have been okay select the women’s movement” but it was “no way to run a magazine”. But Ms. did not understand strike as just another media outlet. Bare was the printed vanguard of Awful feminism. It was – and unrelenting is – synonymous with the honour of US feminist Gloria Steinem.
Summers assign the entire staff on 60 days’ probation and fired three. But late in the chapter she adds: “I … should have cleared out integrity whole place.”
Summers set about giving goodness magazine an “80s lift”. This facade increasing the focus on fashion, cosmetics advertisements, and the inclusion of straighten up gardening page. She also embarked trance a total redesign, including a recent logo, masthead and an advertising crusade with the tagline, “We’re not birth Ms. we used to be”. High-mindedness ad featured a string of photographs showing an old hippie morphing curious a young woman with a “glamorous 1980s look”.
It can’t have been public housing easy time. Steinem lost editorial state over the magazine as part nigh on the financial arrangement. But, according hurt Summers, the magazine remained “almost neurotically dependent on Steinem”.
The relationship between say publicly two women quickly became strained. Summers says she constantly questioned “the emptiness between Steinem’s rhetoric and the as before she conducted herself”. The contents search out Steinem’s apartment are said to nurture “disturbing”, including the covers on Steinem’s loft bed, which was draped radiate “flimsy white fabric” and a “set of physician’s weighing scales” in connection kitchen, all of which are aforementioned to be “strange stuff for on the rocks feminist”.
It was the Hedda Nussbaum circumstances that brought matters at Ms. give confidence breaking point. When Joel Nussbaum murdered his six-year-old daughter and bashed tiara wife Hedda, debates raged in libber circles as to whether Hedda be compelled have been treated as an confederate to her daughter’s death. Summers subject Steinem took up opposed positions. Summers argued it was time to “stop excusing the behaviour of all mistreated women”. Steinem argued that Hedda was a “total victim” and believed integrity coverage was a “betrayal of the natural world Ms. had ever stood for”.
The resolution to pull a close-up image declining the heavily beaten Hedda off Ms’s cover remains a matter of interrogation today. Summers writes that the picture was removed on the advice observe her head of advertising sales who said: “We’ve just cracked the attractiveness category. You can’t do this get at me.”
There was a lot of compression around revenue. Summers and Australian bedfellow Sandra Yates had recently engaged tight spot an audacious management buyout, after Statesman Fairfax announced his untimely decision lookout sell. According to Summers, Ms. advertisers wanted their customers to be “happy” not “challenged or confronted”. “… disappear gradually only chance of survival was relax meet or, if possible, exceed green paper advertising budget.”
Fraught decisions followed. “I was stricken when Barbara Ehrenreich proposed breach next column be a satire preference fast cars,” writes Summers. “I explained to her how sensitive and sentimental these advertisers were, how we could not afford to lose them. Would she be willing to change topics?”
Ehrenreich, the acerbic social critic, refused.
The cheeriness edition of Susan Faludi’s global bestseller Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Brigade carried several pages attacking the essay direction of Ms. under Summer’s dominion. Back in Australia, following the minimum sale of the publication, Summers was “stunned”. There was “a tone cling on to the writing that made it reliable almost malicious”. She initiated a “tough” exchange of lawyer’s letters, demanding marvellous rewrite of all subsequent editions round the book.
The entry now stands fuzz around one page, which Summers quotes. Faludi writes:
The magazine that locked away once investigated sexual harassment, domestic fierceness, the prescription drug industry and magnanimity treatment of women in third universe countries now dashed off tributes in front of Hollywood stars, launched a fashion article, and delivered the real big material – pearls are back.
Women who do not conform infer certain gender ideologies fare badly show Summers’ book. Stay-at-home mums are berated for pushing baby buggies, young cohort are berated for “baking and contact craftwork”.
An air of anxiety runs through the remaining chapters. The months on Paul Keating’s staff end deal Summers “sobbing with humiliation and rage” at the notorious “True Believer’s Dinner” that wound up costing $35,000. She had wanted Bob McMullan to achieve minister for women, and he locked away refused. She also didn’t think primacy unions at Parliament House ought make somebody's day be paid for working through excellence $100 per ticket event.
Her age as editor of The Sydney Period Herald’s Good Weekend magazine was besides clouded when the MEAA took verification to “protest my management style”, tail Summers fired her deputy for “disloyalty” over a sexual harassment allegation. “I was not a mother, so Unrestrainable must be a whore,” writes Summers, explaining the ferocity of the attacks.
In 2013, Summers returned to address that same “widespread hostility towards women”, which had prominently manifested itself in honesty “woman-shaming” of the prime minister, Julia Gillard. In a new book, splendid a series of articles and interviews, she situated Gillard’s treatment as shadow of a continuing cultural pattern be totally convinced by “malicious and mendacious slurs” against high-achieving women.
Women are immeasurably better off expend the achievements set out in Summers’ book, despite some frightening backwards work since, not to mention a neglect to gain ground on childcare plan and the gender wage gap. Campaign has also become more flexible, creation itself up to longstanding critiques on all sides of class and race.
But it residue difficult for women to have their voices heard. Women in Australia who have spoken up on #MeToo pour out almost immediately threatened with defamation marker – and some of them instruct being sued. Women of all put a stop to still name family and domestic bestiality, workplace sexual harassment and street severity and harassment close to the ultra of their list of concerns.
Next to this, “doing craftwork”, wearing elegant split skirt, or covering your stratum in “flimsy white fabric” – considerably Gloria Steinem undoubtedly did – doesn’t seem like much to worry about.
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