fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

This is a beautiful collection of correspondence surrounding the article my Nan wrote in 1963 for the Journal of Agriculture's Farm and Home section, which you can read below. I feel the letters speak for themselves! THE LITTLE ONES AT HOME by Johanna Bowen Journal of Agriculture, Farm and Home Many adults look upon the play of the tiny child as merely a way of passing the time and of keeping him out of the way between meals and bed. To the little one, however, playing is living. It is all-important and very, very real. Above all it is the beginning of the child’s education. Correspondence between Alwyn and Johanna All thanks to my fabulous Aunt Felicity for her discovery of the correspondence to do with the article, and transcribing all the letters. COPY of handwritten letter “ASHBY” Gingin Sept, 30th [1963] Dear Mrs Bowen, Thank you for your letter (of last October!) to the “Journal of Agriculture” with ideas for the “Farm and Home” section. As you say, there are...

This article, written by my Nan, was published by Department of Agriculture WA’s Journal of Agriculture in July 1964 for the “Farm and Home” series. My Nan trained as a Kindergarten Teacher in the very early days of Kindergarten in WA and at the age of 23 she was in charge of a cutting-edge Kindergarten in North Perth. In an interesting side note, she was also a Voice Actor for the radio plays on the ABC during that time; my Nan is way cool, and a person who always brings out imagination and stories from the people she meets. As with her writing on Women’s Liberation , I find this article fascinating for its practical love and respect for children and their play, and the respect for the incredibly important educational role of parents in the home with young children. As is consistent with the way I was brought up, this educational role is about the parent being the educator and guide, not simply the provider of education from other people and sources. My Mum and her mother...

My Nan and Papa were great storytellers and their children are preserving their writing and sending it out to their grandchildren to read. Mostly the stories are anecdotes from real life and stories told to their children. This piece of writing from my Nan about Women’s Liberation was a surprise inclusion, but I was particularly glad to read it, because it was a testimony to the daily hard work, from my grandmother’s generation onward, of women intent on social and political reform. If you want to see exactly how my Nan embodied the ideas in the writing below when imparting her own practical advice for women educating children in the home, here is her article for the Journal of Agriculture . Even more interesting is the correspondence between my Nan and Mrs Alwyn Scott of the Journal of Agriculture . These thoughts on Women's Liberation also show that while extraordinary strides have been made in attitudes towards women since my Nan wrote this piece, there is still a long w...

I think my friends and I live in a bubble of being confident in change for universal progress rather than complacency for unfair profit Frustrated Voter, well, me actually This year I was given no choice in the political leaders, the political policies, the political candidates or the media coverage I had to endure for the Federal Election. Everything was given to me by the Boys Club . I, for one, am no longer interested in the political leaders endorsed by the Boys Club , the political policies created by a room full of alumni of the Boys Club , the candidates who are created and approved by having to work through the ranks of the Boys Club to get pre-selection and the media coverage that assumes that we all love the Boys Club and their ideas and their methods. It's boring, and at the moment I have no way to vote outside the Boys Club . I was once told that the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So if I wish to see political...

EDITED: Edited for correct and current use of language on 9 March 2015, thanks to the followers and admins at One Billon Rising Australia . The most important thing to acknowledge is that even when trying to argue that we think about sex in an unhealthy manner, I used words that encouraged the same unhealthy attitude. It's all around us, this language that judges only one person in the multi-person act of sex. The second thing to acknowledge is that eighteen months of reading a lot of women's writing from all over the world, and eighteen months of a lot of experience with and thinking about sex, does tend to change a woman! For example, my first mainstream publication, all about sexual practice, that you can read right here . I had a very illuminating conversation a few weeks ago with a friend in which we discussed a character in a play. The character was a prostitute sex worker and the action for her character in the narrative revolved around her picking up a client i...

Sometimes my cultural gag reflex is an angry one, one that leaves me heaving and a little teary . Sometimes my cultural gag reflex is a frustrated one, leaving me saying either too many words , not enough words , or incompletely thought out words. But mostly my cultural gag reflex is a bored one ; because as a woman the items offered for my cultural intake can be very boring indeed. I would like to present a short survey of my thoughts as I watch a standard film or theatre offering that does not meet or barely meets the minimum of the Bechdel Test . The Bechdel Test asks if there is two named female characters in the script that talk to each other for a minute about something other than men. Examples of scripts that fail the Bechdel Test fill our cinemas, our stages and other areas of our popular culture * , and that means I am bored an awful lot, alas. The first thing that happens with the standard non-Bechdel compliant script is that when I meet the first female character I want...

When I didn’t know the lyrics and hadn’t seen the video clip, I really loved listening to Blurred Lines . I only heard it on the radio in the office and, due to actually working and sitting some distance from the radio, all I could hear was the bubblegum pop and Pharrell’s hoot. And then came the day that I watched the video clip, read the lyrics and my now robust cultural gag reflex kicked in; who is this Thickehead for whom respect and consent is a blurred line? And why is every sentiment in his song and video achingly retrograde and yet somehow so mainstream? I love to listen and dance to Rap and Hip Hop. I bought my first CD because of Pony , my second for Ooh La La and for close on fifteen years I have suppressed my cultural gag reflex at the lyrics of the Rap and Hip Hop songs I like, especially when I was singing along. It takes a special kind of socialized Stockholm Syndrome to actually sing along to the kind of dehumanising words that these genres encourage for describing...

In the flood of Facebook Outrage (ie, not really worth anything unless you write to all the elected representatives of Australia and then vote to get every last one of the Xenophobic Asshats out of their seat) about the policy announcement on refugees, a buried comment of mine is proving popular. STATUS UPDATE Dear Australian Politicians who think refugees should be sent to PNG. You are Actual Asshats. I think you should read your own advice. http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/Papua_New_Guinea COMMENT There are so many things I could say, but I will stick with the topic in which I am trained - history. Not a single one of those politicians can claim to come from a genetic line that did not come to Australia as a refugee/asylum seeker/immigrant/migrant. Oh, unless they are ALL indigenous Australians? Fuck them and their 'Because I am here now I belong, and I am going to ignore how I got here and ignore what that arrival and continued presence has done t...

This essay was written for a UWA History Unit in September 2001, so soon after September 11 that I referred to those events in their long format. I actually haven't had to change a word to publish it twelve years later, which is a sad state of affairs for Australian narrative on refugees . In the current affairs of Australia in the last month a fascinating example of metaphor and narrative has surfaced. The Tampa Affair alone could have been a watershed in the development of the Australian multicultural psyche if not for the tragic World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks and the resulting USA focus on Afghanistan. In its nearly two weeks alone on the Australian stage, however, the Tampa Affair brought to light some very interesting ‘truths’ in Australian public opinion and illuminated some of the intrinsically Australian metaphors and narratives regarding our presence on these shores and how racially tolerant we really are. As my references for this essay I am using the letters...

In general I have very much enjoyed articulating, writing and reading whatever I wished regarding my ideas on feminism. The interactions I have had with people because of this openness have been unexpected and are all the more precious because each has taught me something important about people I thought I knew, and people I only know now because I said what I thought. I decided recently not to keep my ideas about equality for all women only to sympathetic and comfortably political audiences because it felt as if I was old enough now to own up to my opinions. I also decided to go all out with the F Word because I didn’t want to have to fight through layers of political correctness or degrees of political engagement in my audience – I was either in or I was out – and I had to declare it. I have found that declaring for a clear line of politics and communication has focussed my frustration with inequality to a productive degree. The most interesting manifestation of this focus is th...

I have been trying to work out where my Female Misogynist Asshattery comes from, and I think some of it results from progressive influences on my reading material and education while I was growing up. I often reconsider my reading material in order to speculate on where I get my ideas, because books have always been a very strong influence on how I think and how I view the world. I read a lot of books from specific genres when I was young, and they presented me with ideas about life that were contradictory and have meant that I, thankfully, stand at an ideological fault line between several projections of women and their place in the world . I am a reader first and foremost in life, and my Dad guided a lot of the decisions I made in my formative reading years. My Dad never restricted my reading, I could read whatever I want, and I took full advantage of this fact. At home I read the books from his childhood and they were a unique set of books to grow up on, because my father grew up...

Mary Wollstonecraft Portrait in the NPG At the end of the Eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to discuss the rights of women in the public political sphere, via natural and reasonable justice in the private domestic sphere. She supplemented her arguments for women's rights with appeals for social utility; that freed women make for better men. The dichotomies of reason and feeling, of nature and culture, and of private and public were the chains of female servitude to the pleasing of men in her time. Wollstonecraft questioned why equality is equated naturally with women displaying masculine qualities and not men displaying feminine qualities or equating masculine and feminine as the two equal parts of the same indivisible whole. If the reasoning mind is sexless, and humans only divided into differing parts for reproductive purposes and not to divide the power of reason and feeling between the sexes, why must the victim become the abus...