Women's Rights `off The Agenda'
Illawarra Mercury
Wednesday November 19, 2003
FACT: Australian women's total average weekly earnings are just 66 per cent of men's.
FACT: The proportion of women in full-time employment has not increased in 30 years.
FACT: In 1996, a reported 1.1million women had suffered domestic violence; in 2001, a reported 13,500 had been sexually assaulted.
MYTH: Prime Minister John Howard's claim in 2002 that the feminist battle had been won.
FAR from the feminist battle having been won, renowned feminist academic Anne Summers believes it has been taken off the agenda.
The best-selling author and adviser to former prime minister Paul Keating, yesterday painted an unsettling picture of today's women to a packed audience at Wollongong City Gallery.
Dr Summers, guest speaker at The Friends of the Wollongong City Library luncheon, is on a national tour to promote her latest book The End of Equality - Work, Babies and Women's Choices in 21st Century Australia.
The book promises to do for a new generation what her ground-breaking book Damned Whores and God's Police did for women of the '70s and '80s.
``Although we never achieved full equality of opportunity between women and men in Australia, we did for a couple of decades have it as a goal," she said.
``Today we have stopped even having the national conversation about women's entitlements and women's rights."
Dr Summers said that women were still battling for equal pay and promotion opportunities and against discrimination during pregnancy.
She is pushing for a royal commission on the equality of women in Australia and hopes her book and national tour will ignite debate.
``Women's equality is no longer on the agenda ... it has been replaced by the `breeding creed'," she said. ``This is the philosophy of procreation being advocated by the Federal Government and other powerful agents in Australia who are panicking about our declining birth rate."
The baby bonus was a ``cruel" Government incentive to keep women in the home rather than the work force.
Saturday's Weekender feature will focus on the issues raised by Dr Summers and Wollongong women's response to them.
© 2003 Illawarra Mercury