IT IS DIFFICULT TO say exactly why for two decades I kept nine boxes stuffed with clippings, newsletters, minutes and court transcripts from work I did at university. They travelled from a tiny studio apartment in Sydney’s inner city, to musty homes on sea-cliffs, into storage for years while I lived in America, and back again to perch on crowded shelves in a little cottage sitting on a peninsula between the harbour and the sea.
They followed me everywhere, these large inchoate cardboard cubes, cracking at the corners and bursting with paper. They were untidy and unresolved. They bothered me; but I could not throw them out. I could not entirely figure out why. I think I wanted to think that the tale they told mattered.
I guess I hoped that one day I would have a story to recount about my twenties, a period lived on inner-city streets and sandy beaches and punctuated by exams, a strange crew of delightful albeit temporary boyfriends, explosive parties and trips to India. Throughout that time, as I was falling in and out of love, cramming for law exams and repairing boots when soles wore out on dance floors, I was trying to challenge the Sydney Anglican Church’s oppression of women, a church I had begun attending with my family when I was ten.
This was a church that still told women to be silent, to not speak when men were present, to submit to male authority. A church that tried to rebrand and prettify patriarchy, to pretend it was not ancient but countercultural, resisting the sinful pull of modern feminism. A church many of my friends fled. For those who stayed, there was comfort and community but often a cost — one uniquely talented friend told me when she accepted her husband’s proposal that she had somehow prayed away her sin of ambition.
The boxes dared me to remember.
What is it about a young bout of activism that stays with you so long, no matter if you succeed or, in my case, fail spectacularly? Why do we keep these fragments, why do we honour these moments of our younger selves? Is it the memory of hope? Is it the belief that even this history, piecemeal and peripheral, matters? What makes a story worth remembering? Should we only collect remnants of success, and sweetness, or also pay homage to foul odours and failure? Is the sweetness simply in the achievement, or more in the striving, and the dreams?
I was a mother of two children in primary school by the time I began going through my boxes. I was tempted to just throw the lot out, but was also conscious of how much of my early self was stuffed in there — all the foolishness and earnestness and taking-myself-seriously. I tried to skip through them quickly, but kept getting snagged on snippets. There is a certain poetry to campaigning for reform: circling an institution, blowing trumpets and occasional raspberries, and demanding to be heard. And what I realised was that here, in my own life, was proof that what we often miss in many sweeping histories of protest — of, say, ‘waves’ of women’s protests — is an account of the decades in between, the middle phases of drawn-out campaigns, the years when often all seems futile and lost, and yet people still persist.
That’s not just the story of feminism; it’s the story of anyone who has sat through P&C or council meetings, tried to clean up local football fields or stormwater outflows, to improve community sport or foster art, or cared about something bigger than themselves, and who found their good intentions led them into a quagmire of boring meetings and years of crushing inaction before things, finally, shifted or changed. It’s also the story of those who tried, but never saw anything change, not in their lifetimes. And it’s about allowing ourselves to try, and honouring ourselves for caring, trying and giving a damn.
IT ALL BEGAN, FOR ME, with a court case. In 1992, I was sitting in a law office, paginating documents: stamping them in order, a mind-numbing but vaguely meditative task. I was working as a paralegal to finance my Arts/Law degree, and had decided to devote a year to writing a History honours thesis, though I was not yet sure of the subject. As I sat there, thumping the pages rhythmically with a stamp, I listened to the radio. During a newsbreak, a woman announced that a bishop was being taken to court because he wanted to allow women to become priests. I dropped the stamp and dashed across the road, up to the courtroom.
The scene was striking. Before me, a row of male judges faced a row of men in wigs as a small crowd of women watched from chairs provided for the public. It was a telling image: a group of men from the church were appealing to a group of men of the law to stop women from entering higher ranks. To stop women from speaking for God. To stop women seeking equality. To stop women.
Something about that smelled bad. In my years of attending local churches I had been told that theology was immutable, ahistorical, and had been engraved on a tablet and passed down by God; and that the only way to interpret Paul’s instructions to parts of the early church — that a woman should not have authority over a man — meant that, for all time, women should not be priests. Now I saw this bishop read the Bible another way. I also knew the Bible said not to take fellow believers to court. But now I saw fierce disagreement, and men so desperate to keep women in their place that they were employing the clumsy, expensive instrument of the secular law to do so.
It was a bit rich given that a few years earlier the churches had successfully lobbied for exemptions from the federal anti-Discrimination Act. They’d wanted to be able to discriminate with impunity, to not be bothered by the laws of the land when it came to matters such as employment. And yet now they wanted not to avoid the law, but use it to uphold discrimination.
I returned to my office carrying a press release from the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW); I had a topic for my thesis.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, a school friend who went to my church walked up to me at a Law ball, just before my date embarrassingly punched another man on the dance floor, and stared at me as I stood holding a glass of red wine. ‘This research you are doing on women. You know, you are doing the Devil’s work.’ I stared back and emptied my glass. I didn’t know then how often Christian conservatives had described feminism as demonic, how successfully they had cast female rebellion as sin. The sin, they say, is challenging male authority; to rise up, then, is not answering the call of God but the call of the devil. Women who do this are Jezebels; I have heard stories of women being subjected to exorcism rituals so the spirit of feminism might be cast from them. Even my gentle mother was chastised by Brethren elders for wearing bright lipstick when she was a teenager in the 1950s; she laughed when she told me they called her a Jezebel.