Feminist proof that men owned women?

In a debate on gay marriage a feminist using the name "Min of Billinudgel" decided to throw in some patriarchy theory. She claimed that until recent times marriage was based on property rights for men:

Example: a man’s goods and chat(t)els - hence the reason that widows were until recently described as chatelaines. That is, the wife and the kids were/are defined as ‘moveable property’.

Min's idea is that widows were called chatelaines, that chatelaine derives from the word chattel, and that this proves that women were/are treated in marriage as men's property.

The proper response to these kind of feminist arguments is scepticism. A little research usually proves them false.

So what is the origin of the word chatelaine? It is part of a pair: a chatelain is the male keeper of a castle, a chatelaine the female mistress of a castle (or country house). So Min's argument can't work, as the word was applied in a similar way to both men and women.

Widows were sometimes called chatelaines, but in a literary sense of a woman who found herself running a country house, e.g. "Mrs Gareth, widowed chatelaine of Poynton, is fighting to keep her house with its priceless objets d'art ..."

Why would Min want to believe that women existed as male property? It fits patriarchy theory: the belief that autonomy makes us human, that men have autonomy at the expense of women, that women are therefore not treated as fully and equally human, and that this is due to men organising society to oppress and dominate women.

It's a dismal theory in that it assumes the worst about society: that past generations of women have not had a fully human existence, that men have acted in bad faith toward women, and that institutions like marriage are based not on heterosexual love or an ideal of family life but on issues of power and gender conflict.

Min made one other contribution to the debate. Someone had suggested that if gay marriage were to be permitted because it had become socially acceptable, then so too might polygamy or incest one day gain social acceptance and therefore have to be made legal. Min replied:

The reason that a number of sexual practices are not acceptable, such as incest is because there is the element that one of the partners to the relationship would be a victim of coercion.

Likewise with polygamy. While some people might be quite happy within a polygamous relationship, there are a number of examples especially in fundamentalist religions of younger members being coerced into becoming junior wives and therefore subordinate to the senior wife - and especially the coercion element, that is in spite of the girl’s own wishes.

Obviously, very obviously the same rule of law would apply to same sex marriages - that a marriage is null and void should there be an element of coercion prior to entering into the marriage.

Min is apparently a modernist when it comes to morality. She believes that everything is moral if it is freely chosen. Therefore, the only way to legitimately oppose a practice like polygamy is to argue that it is coerced in some way.

It's not an approach that is likely to maintain any existing standard: a polygamist would merely need to display the free consent of his wives to have his marriage endorsed as moral. Min's approach to morality would not only lead to an acceptance of gay marriage, but to nearly any conceivable kind of marriage.

Trials of a feminist daughter

Rebecca Walker was brought up by an American feminist icon, Alice Walker. Rebecca, though, does not share her mother's feminism and for obvious reasons.

Modernity makes individual autonomy the key good in life. Feminism insists that women receive an equal measure of autonomy. Where, though, does this leave motherhood? If you believe, above all, in "independence" - in being able to follow your own will in any direction - then motherhood will be thought of as an impediment.

And so it was in the Walker household. Rebecca was brought up to think that having children was the ultimate form of servitude, and Alice put motherhood low down in her priorities.

Rebecca found it impossible to adopt her mother's feminism: as a child she yearned for a more traditional mother and she found it difficult later in life to suppress her own maternal instincts. When she finally had a child of her own, and found it such a rewarding experience, the break with her mother's feminism was complete.

Here is Rebecca West's criticism of feminism in her own words:

The other day I was vacuuming when my son came bounding into the room. 'Mummy, Mummy, let me help,' he cried. His little hands were grabbing me around the knees and his huge brown eyes were looking up at me. I was overwhelmed by a huge surge of happiness ...

It reminds me of just how blessed I am. The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother - thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.

You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.

In fact, having a child has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Far from 'enslaving' me, three-and-a-half-year-old Tenzin has opened my world. My only regret is that I discovered the joys of motherhood so late - I have been trying for a second child for two years, but so far with no luck.

I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

... I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

... the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.

Now I simply cannot understand how she could have been so permissive ... A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things ...

As a child, I was terribly confused, because while I was being fed a strong feminist message, I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on ...

When I hit my 20s and first felt a longing to be a mother, I was totally confused. I could feel my biological clock ticking, but I felt if I listened to it, I would be betraying my mother and all she had taught me.

I tried to push it to the back of my mind, but over the next ten years the longing became more intense ...

I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities ... But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?

... there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been made, you need to make alterations.

A throwback policy?

It seems likely that the Rudd Labor Government will introduce a guest worker scheme, bringing South Pacific Islanders to Australia to harvest crops.

(This is, oddly enough, a step back to the 1860s when kanaka labour was brought to Queensland to work on the sugar and cotton plantations.)

There is some resistance by the unions to the proposal. The national secretary of the CFMEU has warned that the guest woker scheme could lead to the "Mexicanisation" of the country's job market:

The large movement of guest workers from the Asia-Pacific to our small labour market would have profound effects on the ability of governments or unions to uphold standards.

Former union boss Doug Cameron has also come out in opposition to the proposal:

Overseas - in the UK, the US, Europe and in Asia - problems with migration schemes are there and we can't just sweep it under the carpet.

However, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has approved a guest worker scheme on the basis that it would increase "labour market mobility". The Australian Workers Union has also given "in-principle support".

It's interesting to find the ACTU basing its policy on extending "labour market mobility". It wasn't that long ago that leaders of the ACTU could be found singing the Internationale; now they are echoing the free market ethos of the employer organisations.

We shouldn't be too surprised by this. A lot of union leaders today have little connection to the working-class. Bill Shorten, head of the Australian Workers Union before his recent election to Parliament, and one of the key supporters of the guest worker policy, is an alumni of Xavier College, the most prestigious Catholic school in Melbourne.

The Rudd Government seems to have committed itself to the guest worker policy, despite considerable opposition to the scheme from a number of well-informed sources. The guest worker option has been questioned not only by the unionists cited above but also by:

- The Australian Farm Institute
- The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs
- Authors of the Australian Government's White Paper on the Overseas Aid Programme (2006)
- Emeritus Professor Helen Hughes
- Sandy Cuthbertson, Centre for International Economics, and Rodney Cole, ANU, in their research into population growth in the South Pacific Islands

I would suggest that those wanting to familiarise themselves with the arguments read the parliamentary research report prepared in 2006. Before I begin quoting sections of the report I'll briefly list the arguments it cites against guest worker schemes:

- they encourage inefficiency and backwardness in the rural sector
- they are a spur to illegal immigration
- they are expensive to administer
- they have failed overseas
- they distort the development of third world nations
- they make rural work unattractive to local workers
- they exploit immigrant labour
- they are likely to create welfare dependent ghettoes in Australian cities
- other developing nations will expect to join in

I can't quote every relevant section of the report. One interesting item of information, though, is that a survey of farmers showed that only one in ten thought that labour shortages were preventing the expansion of their business. In other words, 90% of farmers are confident that they already have enough labour not only for current needs but also to expand further.

The Australian Farm Institute undertook research into a guest worker scheme, but didn't endorse the option for these reasons:

A recent Australian Farm Institute study of farm demography examined but stopped short of recommending a guest-worker scheme to alleviate seasonal farm-worker shortages in the short term.

It suggested that such a program would need to be heavily regulated and monitored to prevent exploitation of the workers involved, and could lead to dependency on such labour on the part of otherwise unproductive growers. The agricultural labour force more broadly has increasingly required skilled workers to operate the high-tech (and expensive) farm machinery used in the production of crops such as grains, cotton or sugar, or, for example, to generate and interpret crop production data and manage genetic improvement in livestock herds. Referring to the farm sector labour force generally, the AFI study found that the Australian farm sector is not competitive in attracting labour. Low remuneration, poor conditions and lack of professional development or career structures were leading to labour shortages, especially in the horticultural industry.

The AFI study argued that in the medium to long-term the problems of the farm sector can only be met by a concerted effort to ‘professionalise’ the farm labour force. Farming is now a knowledge-based industry. The report concluded that:

"... over the medium to longer-term, a substantial shift will need to occur in how farmers manage the rural workforce. The focus on keeping rural wages low will need to change, and a greater focus will need to be placed on ‘professionalising’ the rural workforce by developing training and career structures.

"Farmers will need to recognise that in order to successfully produce the quality of outputs that are demanded by consumers in higher-value markets, a skilled and motivated workforce is essential."

The section of the parliamentarly report summarising the views of the Department of Immigration runs as follows:

The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, in submissions to parliamentary inquiries, has consistently warned that there are serious risks associated with a Pacific guest-worker program. They argue that similar guest-worker programs would be sought by other countries and possibly other groups of employers. There would be significant problems of compliance. Pacific Islanders have high visa overstay rates. (The country with the highest visa overstay rate in 2004–05 was Kiribati.) A guest-worker scheme would increase these overstay (and illegal work and social security fraud) rates. It could lead to stigmatisation of Pacific Island communities in Australia, and a backlash against the migration program.

The department argues further that the level of management and extent of controls necessary to ensure employer and employee compliance with program conditions, and to safeguard seasonal workers from exploitation, would render such a scheme prohibitively expensive: the costs could outweigh the benefits. It points out that expectations regarding financial benefits for individual guest workers and the level of remittances sent home could be unrealistic, once costs of living and taxes in Australia are taken into account. (Temporary residents are taxed at a flat rate of 29 per cent.)

I'll finish by quoting the problems identified by the report with guest worker programmes overseas:

Debate about guest-worker schemes in Europe is coloured by the failure of earlier experiences; Germany’s ‘Gastarbeiter’ program is often cited as the archetypal guest-worker failure ... The program ‘failed’ because the guest workers who were supposed to leave stayed. After the program was abruptly ended with changed economic conditions in 1973, immigration continued as the ‘guest workers’ were joined by their families, and later by asylum seekers.

... A study published in July 2003 by the UK Trades Union Congress claimed there were up to 2.6 million migrant workers in Britain who were under the control of ‘gang-masters’ and unregulated recruiters. It claimed that farmers were unable to make the distinction between ‘legals’ and ‘illegals’; that many couldn’t afford to pay wages above welfare levels, and that people were evading taxes and being exploited. It made the point that while there was a system in place to recruit seasonal guest workers from Eastern Europe, there was no infrastructure to recruit people from East Anglia or Essex.

The USA ... As in Europe, debate about guest workers is coloured by the failure of an earlier program, the ‘Bracero’ program. This ran from 1942 to 1964, and admitted mainly agricultural workers from Mexico. It was accompanied by massive illegal immigration, and followed by even more massive illegal immigration ... According to Mark Krikorian of the Centre for Immigration Research in Washington:

"... As immigration has increased, native-born low-skilled workers (those most directly affected by foreign-labor programs) are increasingly dropping out of the labor force, and the tendency seems most pronounced among teenagers.

"... guest-worker programs just can’t work even on their own terms. Every guest-worker program - everywhere - has failed. In every instance, they lead to large-scale permanent settlement, they spur parallel flows of illegal immigration, and they distort the development of the industries in which the foreign workers are concentrated."

Canada ... As in the US agricultural sector, the ready access to low-skilled cheap foreign labour provided through CSAWP has been criticised as downgrading productivity and competitiveness in the sector over the longer term, as employers are able to avoid innovation and investment in new technology. Another criticism is that the Canadian guest-worker program, with its many layers of administration, would be so expensive that the costs to government would outweigh any economic benefits to the nation as a whole. Canadian taxpayers are thus subsidising employers’ use of cheap labour.

Network dinner a success

This year has been a good one so far for the Australian Traditionalist Conservative Network (ATCN). There has been a steady growth in the network over the last five months. On Wednesday night Melbourne members of the network got together for a social evening at a restaurant in Carlton. It was an enjoyable night out with some interesting and relaxed political conversation. I'd like to thank those who attended; if you missed out there'll be further opportunities later in the year.

(If you're not part of the network but are interested in finding out more there's a link in the sidebar.)

The revolutionary family heads West?

Here is someone else who thought of the family in technological terms. In 1932 Leon Trotsky defended the changes to family life made in revolutionary Russia:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.

There is a familiar reference to autonomy theory at the end of this passage. If you believe that autonomy is the key good, then politics will be aimed at "liberating" (or freeing or emancipating) the individual from the "fetters" (impediments, prisons, restrictions) of unchosen, external commitments.

More striking, though, is Trotsky's technological vision of an alternative family. He speaks of the traditional family as a "shut-in petty enterprise" to be replaced "according to the plans" by a "finished system of social care".

What might appear to someone else as an attractively private and intimate realm of human life, becomes to the technological mind a "shut-in petty enterprise" to be prised open, made subject to technocratic planning and enlarged through socialisation.

It's no use casually dismissing Trotsky's views. His revolution has become our revolution. The measures advocated by Trotsky for the family have been increasingly implemented in the Western democracies.

So has Trotsky been vindicated? Perhaps not. Trotsky wanted two things. First, he wanted to maximise individual autonomy, which meant "liberating" individuals from parental authority and from moral codes and making divorce easy. Second, he wanted to subject relationships instead to a kind of scientistic reason in which relationships could only be ordered by "naturalistic" concerns such as physical and psychological health.

What Trotsky expected was that when relationships were subject only to naturalistic concerns that society would move closer to the ideal of life-long monogamous relationships:

A long and permanent marriage, based on mutual love and cooperation — that is the ideal standard. To this the influences of the school, of literature, and of public opinion in the Soviets tend. Freed from the chains of police and clergy, later also from those of economic necessity, the tie between man and woman will find its own way, determined by physiology, psychology, and care for the welfare of the race.

Well, the tie between man and woman hasn't found its own way toward "a long and permanent marriage, based on mutual love and cooperation". Instead, the closer that the West has moved toward a Trotsky type family, the greater has been the disruption to family life: delayed family formation, lower fertility rates, increased levels of divorce and so on. The scientistic appeal to "physiology, psychology, and the care for the welfare of the race" hasn't proved to be strong enough to defend the family.

One final point. There is a tension between Trotsky's two aims of autonomy and scientism. Autonomy is meant to bring individuals a greater level of freedom and independence. However, subjecting people to a "finished system" which is "planned" by state bureaucrats doesn't have the ring of personal freedom to it - particularly not when compared to the traditional family, which, for all its faults, was independent of centralised control and more deeply and immediately expressive of the social and emotional natures of men and women.

Hat tip: the Trotsky quote was supplied by Mild Colonial Boy.

Australian readers: Have you considered joining the Australian Traditionalist Conservative Network? It's a good time to consider adding your name to the network; we're having a particularly good year so far. More details here.

The family is not a technology

If a mother is to spend time with her new born child she needs to be materially provided for. How does a society arrange this? Traditionally, the husband worked to provide for his family. Now it is assumed that the mother should be provided for by a centralised system of maternity benefits.

Why the change? Up to now, I've focused my answer on liberal autonomy theory. This theory holds that autonomy is the overriding good, that paid work is the key to autonomy and that women should therefore gain maternity leave through their labour force participation.

Does this really explain why we are shifting to a system of centralised, bureaucratic maternity leave? The strength of this analysis is that it is how maternity leave is argued for in the documents. If you read the reports on maternity leave, it is usually argued for on the grounds of female autonomy and labour force participation.

However, there's probably more to it. There was an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun yesterday which reported that certain mothers' groups want all women, including those at home, to be paid maternity leave by the Government:

MOTHERS' groups and women's organisations have called for paid maternity leave for all women, even those not in paid employment at the time of pregnancy.

The Women's Action Alliance, speaking yesterday at the Productivity Commission's inquiry into paid maternity and parental leave, said maternity leave should be inclusive and funded by government.

Lisa Brick, national secretary of the WAA, said current maternity leave schemes excluded many women, including mothers at home, casual and contracted workers, unemployed and recently employed women, and those who were self-employed.

She said some models for maternity leave were too tied to the workplace and meant women often felt compelled to return before they were ready.

"We often wonder why there is this focus on getting mothers back to work when the youth employment rate is still around 15 per cent," Ms Brick said ...

The WAA said maternity leave could be initially funded by combining the baby bonus and Family Tax Benefit B, which spread over the course of a year would work out to around $318 per fortnight.

Ms Brick said an early return to work hampered women's ability to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months -- a view backed by the Australian Breastfeeding Association, who spoke at the inquiry later in the day.

ABA president Margaret Grove said government-funded maternity leave for all women, not just those in paid work, would help the duration of breastfeeding.

"We would like six months' paid maternity leave, government-paid, for all women. It would be for everybody, as the baby bonus is currently for everybody," she said.

So even those organisations which don't tie motherhood to the workplace immediately assume that mothers should be provided for through a centralised, bureaucratic scheme run by the state. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the traditional means of supporting mothers, the one that has been around for millennia, is not even argued against - it simply doesn't seem to register as an option in people's minds. During the entire maternity leave debate in this country I'm not aware of a single public figure who has suggested that husbands might work to support their wives.

What might explain this? The American traditionalist Jim Kalb recently published an interesting document in which he explains the origins of a modern technological mindset. Kalb argues that the view of reason adopted by the West is too limited:

The modern understanding of reason is radically defective, because it takes a fragment of reason, scientific reason, and treats it as the whole.

The Western view of reason, scientism, is based on a sceptical view of what can be known, with the purpose of knowledge being limited to what in practice gives power to achieve an end:

On the scientistic view, we can know only the things that modern natural science knows: things that can be observed and measured by any trained observer who follows the appropriate procedures, and things that are connected to observations by a theory that makes predictions and so can be tested, and is as simple, mathematical, and consistent with other accepted theories as possible. Since those are the only things we know, those are the only things we can treat as real.

Anything beyond that is not knowledge at all. It’s opinion or feeling or taste or prejudice. It doesn’t relate to anything real. Knowledge of the good and beautiful is not knowledge. Contemplation is not knowledge. Knowledge is experimental and oriented toward control ...

The result of this scientistic view of reason is a technologically-ordered world, in which the methods of the modern natural sciences are applied to political, social and moral affairs. The aim is to supply the satisfaction of wants according to a clear, efficient, universal system administered by experts.

You can see how the traditional, family-based method of providing for a mother fails to fit into such an outlook. It is not an application of science or technology to a social question to generate an identifiable and testable "policy", but a decentralised, non-expert method of provision based on qualities difficult to measure, standardise or control, such as instincts and emotions.

The strength of Kalb's analysis is that explains why the traditional practice, as significant as it is, fails to register in terms of public debate. People don't feel comfortable defending it in policy terms because even the pro-family people think something else is expected when discussing social issues.

It's another case of conservatives being too compliant with the settings of a liberal society. If we agree to those settings we will always lose. The terms of policy debate might be rendered technocratic by the modern Western understanding of reason, but that doesn't mean that conservatives should fall in line and limit debate to what appears acceptably technocratic.

We distinguish ourselves best when we state: the family is not a technology. It is an intensely human institution, in its nature not reducible to technocratic control. We should allow the natural, interconnected forms of family relationships to flourish, and be willing to defend them even in the setting of a technologically-ordered world.

Marriage: an oppressive human right?

Is marriage a good thing or a bad thing? Progressive thought doesn't seem to provide a consistent answer to this question.

On the one hand, patriarchy theory tells us that marriage is an institution designed to uphold the privilege of men as a class over women. It is therefore a key institution enforcing the sexist oppression of women.

So you might think that progressives would hold marriage to be a bad thing. However, progressive thought also holds that if gays are not allowed to marry they suffer a major loss of human rights. If gays can't marry, the argument goes, they are being excluded from a vital human institution - which then makes marriage sound like a good thing.

So we end up with a mixed message about marriage. But what would happen if a progressive was forced to confront this inconsistency?

The Rev. Elder Nori J. Rost, a pastor at a community church in Colorado Springs, has written an article discussing the issue. She begins by claiming that marriage was created as an instrument of the patriarchy:

As basically the only means of survival for women, marriage was clearly a restrictive yoke placed on them that assured the continued domination by men in society.

This was still the case at the time of the Reformation:

... marriage was still not about love ... This in itself served to continue to control the bodies of women, but the other implication was that marriage was still primarily a contractual agreement about the current property of the bride and future property of any offspring.

It was only in the mid-1800s, claims Rev. Rost, that love started to have anything to do with marriage. Nonetheless, even today marriage is an oppressive institution:

when heterosexual couples marry, they participate in a patriarchal system that has, at its foundation, control and subjugation of women and children. Moreover, they continue to enforce the perception of marriage as normative and healthy and alternative arrangements as suspect and inferior.

The Rev. Rost then asks what really motivates opposition to gay marriage. She believes that the right opposes gay marriage because it threatens the patriarchal order in three ways.

First, it would help to destroy gender roles:

Two men or two women who choose to share their lives together ... will have to figure out their unique roles ... those roles can be created without the underlying assumption of what the man's role and the woman's role is to be.

Second, it would promote the idea that sex is for pleasure not procreation:

The only purpose of sexual intimacy in gay and lesbian relationships is that of pleasure. I believe this is fearful for the right-wing element to contemplate ...

Third, gay marriage would weaken the wider structure of society:

If, however, we legitimize those relationships by sanctioning same-sex marriage the right-wing people unconsciously fear that such blatant disregard for patriarchal norms will seep over into the heterosexual community like a virus, challenging other old ways of being. In other words, perhaps the conservatives are right: same sex-marriage does threaten the fabric of society.

So to this point we have learned that the Rev. Rost believes that marriage is oppressive and that the right fears gay marriage because it represents a threat to the social order.

Does she therefore support gay marriage? At first, the answer seems to be no. After describing the ills of marriage she complains:

Yet it is this somewhat scurrilous goal that many gays and lesbians are now vociferously seeking.

You might think, having described marriage as a "scurrilous goal" that she would advise gays to stay well clear of it. Yet her final word on the matter is not so straightforward:

Which brings me to the unasked question: Should gays and lesbians be seeking marriage rights at all? ... Is marriage, in its current form with its nebulous history, the prize we should all be eying?

Clearly, there is no easy answer. Early on I was tempted to say that the struggle for marriage is one that is a fruitless waste of our energy and resources. However, I am now more inclined to see it as a step in the right direction ...

While in many ways I think we are climbing the ladder of same sex marriage only to find it is propped against the wrong wall, I also recognize that it is the ladder we seem to be facing. At the end of the day, there is much more to be done ...

Perhaps the means in which marriage is disentangled from the entitlements is by the allowing of same sex marriage and the affront to the patriarchal norms that are so entrenched in the current institution of marriage. Marriage needs to be de-constructed so it becomes iconic of "just" love ...

Her answer is confused and hesitant, but she seems to think that marriage, despite being a bad thing, should still be sought by gays because it will be undone by gay marriage and replaced by a more "just" form of love.

I won't launch at this point into a criticism of the Rev. Rost's patriarchy theory (though I would not want to be defending her claim that love was not an important aspect of marriage prior to 1850). My purpose in this article has been to show the difficulty in the progressive position on marriage: marriage is treated as both an oppressive and unnatural patriarchal construct as well as an important human right from which no-one should be excluded.

Can we make it up?

The late Pamela Bone wrote an article some years ago summing up her life beliefs. In the final paragraph she tells us:

I don't know the meaning of life. I believe it has the meaning we give to it.

Pamela Bone was an independent-minded feminist who didn't always endorse the latest left-wing position. The above quote, though, shows her to be an orthodox liberal modern in terms of her basic life philosophy.

She is assuming that there is nothing to reality (or nothing that can be known) which represents a significant good in life which might anchor our life's meaning. In the absence of a meaning grounded in reality, it is left up to us as individuals to create a meaning.

Little wonder that those who hold this view believe that autonomy is such a key principle: if it's true that we each create our own meaning then we must be left to do this unimpeded and we must give equal respect to what each creates as their meaning as none can be more objectively true than others.

Isn't there, though, a basic problem with all this? If my life can only have the meaning I make up for it then it is meaningless. The whole project is therefore misconceived. Either there is a meaning to life which transcends individual will or we must set aside the whole question of meaning. One or the other.

Which leads me to happiness studies. A researcher in this field, Arthur Brooks, has recently found that conservatives are happier, by a large margin, than liberals:

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%).

Why might this be? It's not because conservatives are wealthier (they're not) and not because there was a Republican President in 2004 (conservatives were also happier than liberals when Bill Clinton was President).

Statistically three factors appear to be important, namely marriage, children and church:

Mr Brooks thinks three factors are important. Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to be married and twice as likely to attend church every week. Married, religious people are more likely than secular singles to be happy. They are also more likely to have children, which makes Mr Brooks confident that the next generation will be at least as happy as the current one.

When religious and political differences are combined, the results are striking. Secular liberals are as likely to say they are “not too happy” as to say they are very happy (22% to 22%). Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being very happy than not too happy (50% to 5%). Religious liberals are about as happy as secular conservatives.

So conservatives are more likely to find an externally grounded life meaning outside of autonomous will: in a commitment to marriage, to parenthood and to church.

Brooks makes clear in explaining his findings that marriage and parenthood aren't of benefit because they bring comfort or pleasure, but because they contribute in the long term to a sense of life meaning. I was reminded when reading this of the complaint of Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger that feminism had left her with "a nice caffe-latte kind of life" but that "the lifestyle trappings are joyless ... and the point of it all seems, well, pointless ... I am childless and I am angry."

I was reminded too of what D.H. Lawrence wrote on this issue; he believed that the autonomy of unimpeded will undercut a purpose in life and therefore was not experienced as a true freedom:

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief ... Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose ...

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

Hat tip: reader George for the happiness studies article.

Does Catherine Deveny embarrass the left?

The destructive, self-loathing, suicidal aspect of left-liberalism has never been better revealed than in the columns of Catherine Deveny.

Deveny writes a regular column for The Age, a newspaper which claims to be Melbourne's quality broadsheet. Her latest effort is an argument against the baby bonus, a payment of $5000 to mothers on the birth of a child.

This is Deveny's gentle introduction to the issue:

From July 1 our Government will be bribing nice white, or almost white, women with $5000 to have a baby. When I say white or almost white, I'm referring to breeders born here or breeders deemed by the Government as acceptable to live here.

Deveny is shocked that white women might be encouraged to have children. It would be better, she thinks, if they were paid not to have kids. Why would you encourage white women to have families of their own when there are non-white families who could be brought here? The answer must be the evil racism of whites:

I see the baby bonus as an extension of the White Australia Policy ... What I don't understand is why the Government is trying so hard to get the Aussie girls breeding when there are hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers with young children gagging to live in Australia ... No one has any answers for me. Here's my answer. Racism.

Deveny herself is a white woman with three children. Is she therefore an evil white breeder? Her answer is very close to a yes:

To be honest, had I known about the environment what I know now, I never would have had three children ... I've met many people who've decided not to have kids ... Whatever the reasons, good on them. Give them a "no baby bonus" I say.

Having just made clear her opposition to family formation, Deveny then offers advice to the Government on how best to support families. Despite being an anti-market leftist, she wants family roles to be commodified:

If government was committed to families, it would be setting up low-cost, high-quality child care in conjunction with fully paid parenting and paid grandparenting ...

Read the whole piece if you want to get the ugly tone of it. Two things are particularly striking about the article. First, it doesn't matter to Deveny that both major parties are committed to very high levels of non-white immigration. In her mind, whites are the dominant oppressor group and therefore society is structured in a systemic way to maintain their privilege. Ideology trumps reality.

The second striking thing is the disdain and contempt for her own coethnics that this ideology produces. She is troubled by the thought of white babies, despite having several herself. Why would any self-respecting white person sign on to such a self-destructive leftism?

What's really happening in Deveny's mind? I suspect that she has absorbed the theory that a white ethnicity was artificially constructed for the purpose of power and domination. Whiteness is therefore to be treated as a uniquely evil phenomenon.

It's not a difficult theory to challenge. It's much more likely that the different Western ethnic groups developed over time in much the same way that the non-Western ones did. In both cases, ethnicity was valued primarily as a source of identity and meaning. Although Western ethnic groups have dominated others at various periods of history, so too have non-Western groups been dominant over others.

Deveny is an end product of an unlikely ideology. The first impression on reading her column is a sense of what is unhealthy and unviable in her mentality. It's difficult to miss, too, the inconsistency in what she herself has chosen to do (have a family) and what she suggests it is politically correct to do (remain childless).

It seems reasonable to doubt the moral authority of a writer like Deveny and to choose instead to subject her political beliefs to critical scrutiny.

Baillieu's negative identity

We recently had a debate here in Victoria on a "Relationships Bill" which permits same sex couples to officially register their partnerships. The leader of the Liberal Party opposition, Ted Baillieu, spoke in favour of the bill. What he said has a wider significance:

For me, this bill is about respect. We are a nation and a state of different people. Indeed, our diversity is at the heart of our collective identity - different people, different views, different lifestyles.

If you read this casually you might skim by the truly radical element of what Baillieu is saying. Baillieu has no problem using the term "collective identity", but consider carefully what he means by this concept. It is not a "positive" identity, in the sense that it represents a set of positive characteristics shared by a community of people. Instead, it is a negative identity, in which people identify with the absence of shared characteristics.

Baillieu has come very close to jettisoning a collective identity. All that he has retained is a very limited negative collective identity. It's little more than the bare bones of a communal identity.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, I think he is representing the liberal position honestly. There are Liberal Party leaders who claim that you can have mass, diverse immigration over many generations and still retain the strength of the older collective identity. It doesn't seem to me to be a likely outcome.

There are problems, though, in giving up on a collective identity. There are practical concerns like a lack of social cohesion; a decline in altruism; and a weakening motivation to defend the society you live in.

More importantly, there is a loss of the communal setting for people's lives. We gain much as individuals from a strong collective identity in which we enjoy a sense of shared history, of a common culture, of closely understood manners and mores, of a widely shared calendar of festivals and celebrations, of a distinct tradition linking generations to each other, and of art and architecture expressing the character of our own community.

Baillieu's position might be more candid than that of other Liberal Party leaders but it is also profoundly deracinated: it represents the mindset of the rootless, modernist individual who has become disconnected from his own communal tradition.

Leading English feminist: our big mistakes

Rosie Boycott is a big name in English feminism. Back in 1971 she founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib with Marsha Rowe and in 1973 the pair founded the publishing house Virago Press.

So it's significant that Rosie Boycott is now rethinking the feminism she did so much to promote. In an article for the Daily Mail Boycott renounces key aspects of feminist patriarchy theory.

Patriarchy theory assumes that autonomy is the key good in life, the good which confers our status as humans, and that men have organised society so that they get autonomy (the power of doing as we will) at the expense of women. If you believe this then logically the traditional male career role will appear to be the truly human one which everyone should aspire to. Furthermore, if society is organised to maximise autonomy for men, then it's logical to believe that men get to do what they want and have easy, privileged lives compared to beleaguered, oppressed women.

Rosie Boycott had such beliefs as a young woman:

When I first became a feminist, back in the 1960s, I thought the male ways of life were the gold standard, the way life was meant to be ...

Unlike women, who were tied to the kitchen sink by their apron strings, enmeshed in childcare from sun-up to sun-down without the time or scope to advance their own careers and intellectual pursuits, men were free of all these onerous responsibilities.

They were free to pursue intellectual goals, to work, to succeed, above all to be leaders of the world.

I believed, along with so many others, that women, deep down (or not so deep down), wanted to do all that as well.

We believed we were prevented from doing so only because men, and the sexist world they created, prevented us.

They kept us out of the club because otherwise their power base would be threatened, and if women didn't stay at home with the kids, ready with the supper, slippers and sherry, then their world would be a much poorer place.

In this view men haven't worked hard for the benefit of women; instead, they have organised in a deliberate way to exclude women from the good life. Little wonder then that second wave feminism damaged relations between the sexes.

Rosie Boycott then explains that she believed that sex differences were the result of conditioning and that being a woman (the non-human role) wasn't something that girls were born into, as a biological destiny, but something they were merely brought up to be:

Girls have started to outperform boys at GCSE and A-levels: they get more places in university and better degrees.

In the U.S. between 1969 and 2000, male undergraduates increased by 39 per cent, whereas female ones increased by 157 per cent.

The trend continues beyond education and into the workplace.

In their early 20s, recent reports show, women are actually out-earning men in many instances.

All this proved to me, and to other feminists, that biology in no way dictates your destiny.

In her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir says: "One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman."

I agreed.

We were all born equal: it was only what happened in the nurturing process that decided the differences between men and women.

And we women were all destined to become desperate housewives - desperate to break out of the rigid roles society had accorded us.

But her expectations were confounded. Women who were "high flyers" in their 20s, elected to scale back their work commitments in their 30s. Was this simply due to discrimination at work? Rosie Boycott once thought so, but now thinks that discrimination cannot adequately explain what is happening - not when women are being actively encouraged in the workplace.

She has read a book by Canadian academic Susan Pinker, called The Sexual Paradox, which discusses some of the hardwired, biological differences between men and women. After briefly listing some of these differences Rosie Boycott writes:

What Pinker has done, in fact, is to have proved how and why girls are different from boys right from the womb, when they are pumped full of different hormones.

You can see these differences from very early on - and they cannot be "overridden".

Nature wins over nurture every time.

I've had many feminist friends who have relentlessly presented their tiny daughters with bright-red fire engines to play with, only to be aghast when they throw them aside in favour of a Barbie doll.

The converse is true for boys.

Above all, the hormones women receive in the womb mean that, by nature, they do not want to be manic, one-dimensional workhorses who invest all their energies in one thing: their job (or hobby).

Overall, they are less extreme than men.

The social critic Camille Paglia once wrote: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

Men are simply more variable - there are more really stupid ones and more very smart ones than women; more extremely lazy ones and more who are willing to halfkill themselves with overwork.

Women, by contrast, are steadier, less risk-taking.

As a consequence, they live longer.

In other words, because of their biological make-up, most women want to limit the amount of time they spend at work and to find "inherent meaning" there ...

Boycott then describes her former understanding of equality:

When I set out into the world as a working woman, I believed the quest for equality with men was a quest for the right to have the same life as a man: a full-time job (an obsessive one at that), a fulltime hobby, a partner who really did split the child-care neatly down the middle, plenty of time for "me" to do whatever I wanted.

Again, note here the contradiction generated by patriarchy theory: the belief that the male career role, as demanding as it is, is the desirable autonomous human one, combined with the belief that men, with their privilege of autonomy, get easy lives in which they are free to do what they want.

Rosie Boycott has redefined her understanding of what true sex equality means. She wants a concept of equality which allows womanhood to be valued, so she suggests that men and women be thought of as equal but different:

Our values, Pinker asserts, are based on the simple fact that the world of men (i.e. success and drive) is the correct model.

While society continues primarily to value skills that emphasise money as the only currency of success, the skills that women have will always be seen as second-rate - and women will be seen to be failing.

The tragedy is that it is women who end up paying the price for this misunderstanding.

Too many of us struggle on in jobs we do not like, simply because the fiscal rewards are seen as the marker of achievement.

I realise, of course, that there is a danger here of over-simplifying the debate: affording a home often requires two full-time incomes.

Yet, it is equally undeniable that all of the women whom Pinker spoke to who had decided to step off the career ladder - whether to devote more time to their children or to develop their own businesses - report far greater degrees of satisfaction.

What we need to do, she asserts, is to stop rating women according to men and accept that the sexes truly are different ...

To make men and women genuinely equal, we have to accept and honour difference, not mark everyone's scorecard according to the same set of standards.

So has Rosie Boycott become a traditionalist? Not really. She is still enmeshed in the modernist principle that what matters is getting what you want, creating your own self and being unimpeded in your choices. She does recognise, though, that today it is the impediment of ideology which is most likely to restrain a woman's free choice in life. So her conclusions, even if they are framed in modernist terms, still seem radically at odds with feminist orthodoxy:

I also believe that Pinker's book should mark a watershed.

Sexual equality is all very well.

But real equality comes from making your own choices, not just following the well-trodden path towards careerism, simply because it has been signposted by society as the only path to success.

Liberation must always be about being yourself, not simply a clone.

The battle of the sexes is over.

Let the fight for women to be women commence.

Alexandra Kollontai: overcoming love

What does modernity mean for women? Last century a radical thinker named Alexandra Kollontai attempted to answer this question.

She was born a member of the Russian nobility, but later became a communist activist. After the October Revolution in 1917, she became a commissar in the Bolshevik government. She was a diplomat in the 1920s and managed to survive the purges in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s.

Kollontai's great cause was women's liberation. She wanted women to remain, above all, independent of men. There's nothing surprising about this attitude: it fits "correctly" with the basic ideas underlying modernism.

According to modernism, our humanity is never secure. We can lose our human status if we are not self-determining - if we don't shape our own selves and our own lives according to our individual will.

This sounds nice, but the devil is in the detail. Kollontai's setting out of the logic of this theory is a warning to us of what it really involves.

Autonomy

In her autobiography Kollontai claims that she knew even as a girl what the struggle for women's liberation required:

That I ought not to shape my life according to the given model ... I could help my sisters shape their lives, in accordance not with the given traditions but with their own free choice ... I wanted to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own little life.

Similarly, Kollontai wrote approvingly of the "new woman" that "she is independent inwardly and self-reliant outwardly".

So the aim for moderns like Kollontai was to throw off whatever seemed to impede or restrict individual autonomy for women.

The first thing to go was the sex distinction. Kollontai saw the traditional male role as the autonomous human one, so she wanted to be defined not as a woman but, in more gender neutral terms, as a human.

In giving up the sex distinction, Kollontai readily abandoned the traditional feminine virtues. She wrote of women that:

it is not her specifically feminine virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as a human being.

In a similar vein, Kollontai described modern woman as having "broken the rusted fetter of her sex" in order to become "a personality," a "human being" (note how being female and being human are set in opposition here). She even gave public lectures in which she:

longs for the female body itself to become less soft and curvy and more muscular ... She argues that prehistoric women were physiologically less distinct from men ... Accordingly, sexual dimorphism may (and should) again become less visible in a communist society.

Love

The abandonment of femininity is striking enough. Kollontai took the logic of modernism even further, though, by rejecting love.

For Kollontai, love between men and women was an expression of an older, oppressive order which women in modern social conditions would gradually be overcome. Love was oppressive because the instinct to be 'blended' with a man inevitably caged a woman's autonomy. It was a waste of a woman's energies which ought to be directed to the achievement of her life goal, namely her career.

Kollontai praised the "new women" whose "feelings and mental energies are directed upon all other things in life but sentimental love feelings." She herself, though, was still influenced by oppressive tradition and so had to struggle in life to overcome love:

this motive was a leading force in my life ... to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will ... Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life ...

I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love ... still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy ... utterly worthless ... We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power.

It is certainly true that we ... were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center ... It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego ... Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognise us as a spiritual-physical force ... [Note how Kollontai can't help but use non-materialist terminology to describe the love experience: "blend our soul", "spiritual-physical force".]

But over and over again things turned out differently since the man tried to impose his ego upon us ... the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter ... after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free - free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal ... work.

When commenting on a novel by the French author Colette, Kollontai writes of the heroine that:

Freedom, independence, solitude are the substance of her personal desires. But when Rene, after a tiring long day's work, sits at the fireplace in her lovely flat, it is as though the hollow-eyed melancholy of loneliness creeps into her room and sets himself behind her chair.

"I am used to being alone," she writes in her diary, "but today I feel so forsaken. Am I then not independent, not free? And terribly lonely?" Does not this question have the ring of the woman of the past who is used to hearing familiar, beloved voices, to being the object of indispensable words and acts of tenderness?

For Kollontai it is the "woman of the past" who hears at home beloved voices and experiences acts of tenderness. Love is not an enduring quality or an important value for her, even if she sought it in her own life. She describes it as a fetter to individual autonomy, just like womanhood.

The experience of great love is an old quality for Kollontai, something not fit for modern conditions, a part of a woman's own self to be dramatically overcome:

The old and the new struggle in the souls of women ... Contemporary heroines, therefore, must wage a struggle ... with the inclinations of their grandmothers dwelling in the recesses of their beings ... The transformation of the feminine psyche, which is adjusted to the new conditions of its economic and social existence, will not be achieved without a strong, dramatic overcoming.

Marriage and motherhood

Kollontai wanted autonomy above all else, which makes it difficult to accept marriage. She states in her autobiography that although she loved her husband she thought of marriage as a "cage" (like "fetter" a word denoting restriction). And so she left her husband to become a political activist:

But as great as was my love for my husband, immediately it transgressed a certain limit in relation to my feminine proneness to make sacrifice, rebellion flared in me anew. I had to go away, I had to break with the man of my choice, otherwise (this was a subconscious feeling in me) I would have exposed myself to the danger of losing my selfhood.

In other words, if her love for her husband became too great, she began to give of herself in the marriage, which then left her panicking that she might lose autonomous selfhood.

And what of motherhood? Kollontai wanted motherhood to be free, in the sense that women could freely choose the father of their child (i.e. it could be any man, not necessarily one they were in a relationship with). Motherhood wasn't to be restricted by requiring a relationship to a man; fatherhood was to be optional, only practised in particular circumstances. Motherhood was also to be socialised, with childcare being provided by the state.

Kollontai thought well of the newer fictional heroines who had "freedom of feeling, freedom in the choice of the beloved, of the possible father of "her" child ... Contemporary heroines become mothers without being married." We are told in one source that Kollontai:

approvingly describes the possibility of maternity now becoming "an aim in itself," distinct from the mother's relations to the child's father. (In this essay and elsewhere, Kollontai only addresses fatherhood in passing as an option interested men could engage in for educational purposes.)

Finally, Kollontai's novel Red Love ends happily, with the heroine Vasya light-heartedly telling her friend that she has left her husband and that she doesn't need a man to raise her child:

“But I haven’t even told you the biggest news of all, Grusha. I saw the doctor. I’m expecting a baby.”

“A baby?” Grusha clapped her hands. “Really? Then how could you let your husband go? Will you let the baby be fatherless, or are you going to be fashionable, and have an abortion?”

“Why an abortion? Let the child grow. I don’t need a man. That’s all they can do – be fathers! Look at the Fedosseyev woman with her three children – they didn’t keep her husband from going to Dora.”

“That’s all very well; but how will you bring it up all by yourself?”

“All by myself? The organization will bring it up. We’ll fix up a nursery. And I’ll bring you over to work there. You like children, too. Then it’ll be our baby. We’ll have it in common.”

Again they laughed.

Comparison

Alexandra Kollontai was brought to such positions by a modernism which is also orthodox in our own liberal societies. So it's no surprise that the West has moved toward the positions Kollontai took several generations ago.

This is especially true of the socialisation of child care; the attempt to make sex distinctions not matter; the "optionalisation" of fatherhood; the priority given to careers as a life aim; and the deferral of marriage in favour of a single, independent lifestyle.

There has not been such an explicit rejection of heterosexual love as that made by Kollontai, although at various times the emphasis has been, as Kollontai would have approved, on short-term casual relationships rather than on more serious commitments.

And if you don't like these trends? Then the response must be to question the principles which generate them. If freedom, understood to mean individual autonomy, is the sole overriding aim, then modern trends will continue. The alternative is not to damn autonomy, but to see it as one good amongst many, and not always superior.

The springs of human action

I had intended to finish up with Jean Devanny, but I found a story of hers on my bookshelf which I can't resist writing about.

It's called "The springs of human action". Devanny uses the story to identify a flaw in her own communist politics. It's the same flaw that struck me on reading Devanny's biography: the failure to hold to the theory consistently.

The theme of the story is sexual liberty. A New Zealand communist, Jimmy, is working as a miner, perhaps in the early 1920s. He exhorts his fellow workers to apply the logic of communist theory to their own homes and marriages:

'Isn't it possible for you to follow a thing out to its logical conclusion?' he demanded hectoringly. 'You can't limit science! You can't annihilate a fact by denying it or refusing to recognise it!'

When he is quizzed about what he means he replies that the miners have two options:

'You can arrogate to yourself every freedom your economic position allows and restrict your wife in the same proportion ... Or you can do as I do - apply the morals of the future regime to your own individual case today. Refuse to make a woman your chattel by tying her to you legally; regard her as a human being like yourself with all the rights and privileges of a human ... she might be the sort of woman that wants a lot, needs a lot from life. She might need other men, for instance ...'

We are told later that:

He and his kind believed in the absolute sex equality of man and woman, believed in freedom of action for the individual.

You can recognise the basic ideas of modernism in such thoughts. According to modernism we are not secure in our status as humans. We only achieve a human status if we are autonomous in the sense of being self-determining individuals. Therefore, it's important to modernist theories, Marxism included, that we not be restricted in what we choose for ourselves.

That's why Jimmy the communist believes that women are being treated as less than human if they are tied to one man and lack the "freedom of action" to take other men as lovers when they desire to do so.

After berating his fellow workers, one of the miners makes a remark suggesting that Jimmy's own woman might be putting his theory to the test. Jimmy picks up on the hint and reacts angrily. He is later forced to admit to himself that he acted from jealousy.

He walks home intending to confess to his de facto, Margie, his own infidelities and to give her the option of leaving him if she wishes. But, arriving home early, he disturbs her with another man.

At this point, Devanny makes some telling points. It's not just that Jimmy struggles with "the fire of his jealousy". Devanny suggests that Jimmy has a transcendent sense of what Margie is as a woman - of her loveliness and goodness - and that he feels deceived to think of her now in lesser terms as just another player. It makes her less special in his eyes, more mundane:

'... you should have told me before you did it ... we always agreed that you would tell me if you liked another man better than me. I'd have let you go.' She dropped her eyes from his.

'I don't like him better than you. I don't like him at all really.'

This turned him cold. He looked away from her and tried to get what that admission meant. It was not hard to get. It means that she was just another - Mrs Phillips ... The Socialist's soul filled with an anguish unspeakable, the anguish of broken trust in something he had reverenced ... His Margie, so good, so kind, so sweet and loving! He knew so much about women. Too much not to recognise now that Margie was an 'old hand' at this game.

(Note how Devanny, supposedly a scientific materialist, once again reaches for words like soul and reverenced to impart meaning to a situation.)

Jimmy tries to apply reason and principles to the situation. He cannot do as other men might and punish her by calling her a bad woman - after all, he believes in sexual liberty as a defining point of a person's humanity. So he has nowhere to go: he cannot bear her betrayal but cannot condemn it either. His principle of liberty hasn't brought him freedom; Devanny writes simply that "He was caged."

Margie then suggests a way out. The answer is to make sex not matter. If it's treated as a meaningless physical act, not expressing anything beyond itself, then the infidelity won't count for much. A relationship between a man and a woman could instead be founded on comradeship or friendship:

... she was right; her attitude was the only one if they were to continue living together. He must conquer himself. What was she saying? - "Make too much of this silly sex act. It doesn't mean anything, really. It is the smallest thing in life. It takes up only a moment or two out of millions of moments. The things that matter are comradeship, congeniality, friendship and kindness ...

(I was reminded when reading this of the modern day feminist who, when it comes to sex, "puts the act itself on a par with sneezing").

Devanny has spelled out the logic of sexual liberty for us. For sexual liberty to be made practicable, sex itself must be made not to matter. It can be made free by being made unimportant. Relationships are to be reconceived in more platonic and mundane terms as expressions of friendship and not of romantic or sexual love.

Jimmy tries to accept the new dispensation:

'She must be right. I must apply reason. If reason can't triumph over emotion, mind over matter, there is no hope for the world. No hope!'

He continues, though, to feel caged and tormented. He comes to think of his situation as hopeless and in a mad despair kills Margie.

So the politics of sexual liberty fails spectacularly in Devanny's story. Why then did she continue to promote this politics? Why stay with a system of thought which you know can't work as it's supposed to in practice?

Jean Devanny: liberty, science and more

This is the last in a series on Jean Devanny, a communist writer and activist of the 1930 to 60s. Having read her biography, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary, I was struck by the number of unresolved inconsistencies in her beliefs. In this post I'll list several more.

Pacifism

The communists of the era were big on pacifism. Devanny, for instance, had helped to establish a Peace League in Cairns in 1935 (p.130); in 1934 she had undertaken a propaganda tour for a movement against war (p.129).

Yet in her May Day speech in 1935 she "launched into a paean of praise for the Red Army". Reminiscing about a military parade she had witnessed in Russia she said:

I never before thought the bayonet a beautiful weapon. Depends on whose body it is intended to be used, doesn't it ... Then the loveliest sight of all. The tractors drawing big guns ... (pp.127-128)

Free speech

The communists peppered their speeches with references to free speech. We learn in the biography of Devanny that:

During 1934, the Workers' Weekly and the Party organisers widened the scope of their agitation on a range of issues, particularly freedom of speech. (p.118)

In that year, Devanny spoke to a large demonstration in the Sydney Domain on the issue of free speech, an event commemorated in verse:

The workers in great numbers gather'd on that afternoon
To pledge their right for freedom and for liberty of speech (p.118)

However, the party didn't defend free speech for its own members. At a meeting in 1942, Jim Comerford asked the party leader "to stop interjecting and to give him a fair go". Shortly after "a few of J.B.'s "loyal" followers threw Jim into the street." (p.197)

Another member, Joyce Batterham, recalled of this time that "When you were directed to do things, you just did it! ... There was ... not much freedom of choice." (p.197)

Devanny herself was not tolerant of opposing views; Hilda Essen wrote of her that "There's no argument, she's simply right." (p.161) According to the historian Stuart Macintyre, Devanny was the first in Australia to use the term "politically incorrect" in rejecting someone's views (p.161).

The climate within the Communist Party is suggested too by Devanny's fear of repercussions in publishing her autobiography. She wrote to Miles Franklin:

Sometimes I feel so sick about the whole thing, the shock to my family, the fear of what they might do to me (the P[arty] I mean) that I wish I had never started on it. (p.269)

Science & materialism

Marxists pride themselves on being scientific materialists and Devanny was no exception. A journalist, Nelle Scanlan, interviewed her in 1926 and was struck by Devanny's "preoccupation with 'scientific socialism'". Devanny told Scanlan that her most recent novel was based upon "the materialistic conception of history." Scanlan recorded that "Greater faith in the infallibility of science could not be found". (pp.38-39)

Yet throughout the biography we find evidence that Devanny perceived the world in other terms; she didn't write as a strict materialist examining "matter in motion", but instead chose to describe things using a "spiritual" vocabulary, and when praising individuals she took the inherent value of character as a real given.

For instance, she describes a visit to a tropical island as a day of "rapture" (p.259); she later declares that she is "a primitive soul" (p.275); she praises a friend as being "Utterly trustworthy, concentrated on things of the mind and spirit, the Doc's sagacity and sincerity could not but be an uplifting influence" (p.205); and she complains that after WWI people were "soul-emasculated" (p.44).

She doesn't seem to have been far from experiencing the transcendent through nature. For instance, in the following passage she writes of an ecstatic feeling aroused by the "unearthly" magnificence of a tropical sunset:

The sunset of this last day was of a nature to make one quake half in ecstasy, half in pain. So clear was the atmosphere that separate trees on the forward part of the mainland ranges stood out plainly ...

An incredible quiet and stillness fell: a glowing stillness, in which the world changed to the colour of old-gold.

Then, in one last ecstatic burst, Woody was let to even greater splendour ... A soft diaphanous veil of rose touched the waters of the main lagoon, the outer sea turned to forget-me-not blue and then dusk, moonless dusk, fell down as though some lordly hand, unable to bear longer the unearthly magnificence of it all, had clapped down a colossal lid. (pp.220-221)

Liberty & fraternity

Communism was supposed to be a movement for liberty and fraternity. However, once again communist theory didn't turn out well in reality. For much of the biography Devanny seems to have been most oppressed and tormented by her callous treatment by the party, rather than by the larger society.

Devanny wrote in 1953, having spent a few years away from the party that, "I am regaining the good humour which horrors and terrors deprived me of for about twelve years." (p.275)

She did have reason to complain. In 1941 Devanny was living in a small settlement at Emuford in Queensland with a group of communist workers. Some of the workers' wives began to spread rumours about Devanny; when she threatened to complain to HQ she was punched in the face by a male comrade. She then travelled to HQ to lodge a protest, but on her return to Emuford a group of comrades assaulted her so badly that she was taken by ambulance to hospital. There's some evidence that she was sexually assaulted.

Devanny was then ostracised by the party; when she had recovered she wanted to return to Sydney but the party wouldn't send the fare. It was finally a businessman who felt sympathy and gave her the money to return home. (p.190)

Not surprisingly, the idealism of the party workers tended to fail over time. The novelist Dorothy Hewett lamented of herself and her partner that "our original political idealism and belief in ourselves [had been] corroded by time, and bitter experience". (p.297) Devanny for her part confessed to Miles Franklin in 1953:

No good assuming that I have any ideals left, Miles. They are as dead as a doornail. (p.268)

My own surprise is not so much that Devanny lost her ideals, but that she lived for so long with such inconsistencies of theory and practice.

Jean Devanny & sexual liberation

In my last post I wrote about the life of Jean Devanny. She was a communist writer and activist from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Devanny believed ardently in her politics, but wasn't able to live consistently by her views. This is especially true when it comes to the issue of sexual morality.

You would expect Devanny, as a radical, to promote the modernist view of sexual morality, in which marriage and traditional forms of sexual morality are thought to be oppressive limitations on the individual and artificial barriers to "free love".

In some respects Devanny did follow the modernist line. She had married a fellow political activist but pursued affairs with an array of other men, including the married leader of the party in the 1930s and 40s, J.B. Miles. Devanny wrote proudly of Miles that,

there was no Presbyterianism - or puritanism, call it what you like - about Leader where the love-life of Party members was concerned. His relationship with myself was proof enough that he stood for the right of the individual to free choice in mating.

Edna Ryan, a fellow communist, spoke of "very enlightened" members of the party in the 1920s in these terms:

Higgins was sexually liberated and so was his wife Joy, and they led separate lives ... Higgins and Kavanagh said, when the revolution comes almost every housewife will leave her husband, will leave home.

According to Edna Ryan, Devanny went further in promoting the cause:

Looking back in 1983, Ryan identified the radicalism of Jean's position: "Unlike Hig and Joy who thought of it as a personal issue, Jean Devanny advocated sexual liberation, particularly for women, as a political issue."

Devanny also pushed the idea of sexual liberation in her novels and short stories. She often chose transgressive themes; one story featured a relationship between a priest and a prostitute. As a result, her works were often criticised for their crudity:

Certain terms recur in the reviews .... an emphasis on "the raw", the "brutal" and "the unpleasant" ... "crude and raw at times" (p.40)

"crude slabs of distasteful sex stuff" (p.37)

"a great deal of unnecessary crudity" (p.292)

Devanny wasn't alone in pursuing the transgressive. One of the heroes of Australian communism in the 1930s was Egon Kisch, a Czech communist who literally jumped off a ship to gain residence in Australia. He broke his leg and was visited by Howard Daniel in hospital:

He took off his pyjama top and exposed his torso. In addition to the tattooed dagger, his right shoulder carried the tattoo of a viper gliding down towards his belly. On the outside of his right arm was the figure of a dancing negro. The inside of his left forearm bore the image of a kind of Fu Manchu head, the left temple pierced by a knife. The girl's head which I had already noticed belonged to a classic whore figure who was lifting her skirt to expose herself.

Kisch became a star speaker for the Australian communists; he and Devanny spoke to 15,000 people at one rally:

The rally ended spectacularly; a call to form a bodyguard for Kisch was 'responded to by thousands of men and women marching alongside, cheering, shouting, singing the "International" again and again.'

This, though, is only one side of the story. In reality it wasn't so easy to cast aside sexual morality. The party found it necessary to set at least some limits on sexual behaviour: Devanny was expelled in 1941 for "sexual indiscretion" and another writer, Dorothy Hewett, was hauled before a party committee, "in considerable moral trouble", for having deserted her husband and children to live with another man.

Even Devanny wasn't consistent. She criticised Dymphna Cusack's novel Southern Steel for containing "great gobbets of crude sex" and Dorothy Hewett's novel Bobbin Up for its "crude sexiness" which "shocked and disgusted" its working-class readers.

Nor did Devanny's abandonment of her marriage in pursuit of affairs work out for her. She writes of an encounter with her husband Hal in 1940:

As he stood beside the carriage window, a wave of regret for the disunity between us swept over me. I fell to weeping.

By 1949 she was ready to make a plea to Hal:

I proposed then that he ... spend the rest of his life making a home for me. And without much hesitation, to my amazement, he agreed ... We were back now to where we started ... I found myself singing occasionally. I would stand at the front gate of an evening, watching for him to come home from work.

So in her own personal life, Devanny chose to return to something quite traditional.

It is difficult to convey in a post like this the inconsistent attitude to sexual morality amongst the communists during this period of time; reading Devanny's biography you find every chapter riddled with contradictory views. Theory and practice were never successfully brought together.