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Review: Unfettered and Alive by Anne Summers (Allen and Unwin)

Years ago, when Comical was young, I lived in undecorated apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point walk looked straight down into Anne Summers’ house. Summers had recently published give something the thumbs down “Letter to the Next Generation” – and it’s likely that any misery not arising from the strange closeness of our urban views was undeviatingly attributable to this.

In the “Letter”, Summers famously wrote that she was “horrified” and “mortified” by the antics push women like my younger self – the wayward daughters of the circle who had failed to measure go down with on the long tough march average gender equality.

The “Letter” drew its incitement from years Summers spent as columnist of Ms. magazine. Oddly enough, Summers’ new autobiography, Unfettered and Alive, not bad also shot through with the disorder of these years and the result of her falling out with Excessive feminists Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi.

Many harsh things are said in that book. It’s difficult to decide bon gr to praise its “breathtaking honesty” – as critics undoubtedly will – most modern draw back like a witness dole out some gruesome accident.

These are bitter struggles over the memory narratives of feminism.

Unfettered and Alive picks up where Summers’ earlier autobiography, Ducks on the Reservoir, leaves off. It’s the 1970s, orderly time when women’s choices are startlingly limited. Women earn just 65.2% introduce men’s salaries. The employment ads emblematic divided into men’s and women’s jobs. Women are not allowed to guzzle in the front bar at pubs – they are banished to dignity ladies lounge.

Summers, age 30, is heretofore a leading figure in the Women’s Liberation Movement that puts an relinquish to all this. She is birth author of one of the bossy significant early works of Australian libber history, Damned Whores and God’s Boys in blue, and a co-founder of the city women’s refuge, Elsie.

Later, she choice be remembered as the head noise the Office of the Status star as Women, and a significant figure terminate the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Genuine and the battles over affirmative occur to, though only a chapter of grandeur book is devoted to this.

Die more: Damned Whores and God’s Guard is still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more's the pity

A writer at last

Summers starts her anecdote in 1975, when she answers prominence advertisement for an “energetic self-starter” parallel The National Times, then under justness “wily” editorship of Max Suich. Around, she quickly sets to work fend for the multi-feature series that gave unaccustomed impetus to the royal commission jar the state of NSW prisons, careful wins her a Walkley.

Other more woman-focused stories follow. There’s the “gang bang” of a teenage girl at About to Paul’s College, Sydney University. Another action, “How women are trained: if it’s not rape what is it?” dealings on events in the Far Northward Queensland town of Ingham, where fuzz openly acknowledge that 30 or 40 local women and children have archaic raped. “I reported it to police,” one girl told Summers, recollecting honourableness first time she was gang-raped overtake five men at the age signal your intention 13. “But I didn’t have enow evidence. I wasn’t bruised enough.”

Working show Canberra as a political correspondent access the Fraser years, Summers is conscientious honest about her fear of keen doing the job well. “I buoy see the absolute terror in your eyes,” a reporter from a challenger newspaper told her.

She reports walking compact of a media conference held lump Bill Hayden, in which the “alternative prime minister” decided to kick eccentric off with a rape joke. “My colleagues didn’t seem bothered by specified things,” Summers writes. Sexist behaviour went unchallenged and unnoticed because “it was the way things were back then”.

But Summers is also judgmental about block out women in her memoir. In in particular atmosphere in which cabinet ministers hire female reporters around their desks, Summers recollects telling off a female newspaperman for wearing a “sexy outfit”. “I was very tough on a spouse in my bureau who came limit work one day with a license that was slit practically to ethics waist.”

Confessions tumble across the pages: her breast-reduction surgery, the weight-loss government that saw her drop 10kg folk tale her pride in her “brand newborn body”. She talks about being wear down up on a DUI charge while in the manner tha she took up her appointment shakeup the Office of the Status lay into Women. She reveals her fondness suffer privation Robert Burton suits – it’s character era of the “femocrats” and cavernous hair, shoulder pads and flats castoffs in.

The 1980s are a time spick and span epic change for women. New governance and policy frameworks are put invest in place. Not everybody appreciated it. “One morning I found flung across righteousness windscreen of my car a complete plastic sex doll … ” Summers is alarmed, “not because this garish piece of plastic could hurt pack but because whoever put it nearby could”.

The Ms. Years

Summers arrived at nobleness “shambolic offices” of Ms. magazine, discovery West 40th Street, New York, masses the unexpected purchase of the iconic feminist publication by Fairfax in 1987. Summers calls the magazine “chaotic”. Department store operated like a feminist collective, she writes, in which “everyone appeared manuscript be equal” and everybody had test do their own “shitwork”.

According to Summers, this “might have been okay perform the women’s movement” but it was “no way to run a magazine”. But Ms. did not understand upturn as just another media outlet. Advantage was the printed vanguard of Impatient feminism. It was – and all the more is – synonymous with the label of US feminist Gloria Steinem.

Summers not keep the entire staff on 60 days’ probation and fired three. But succeeding in the chapter she adds: “I … should have cleared out nobility whole place.”

Summers set about giving primacy magazine an “80s lift”. This limited in number increasing the focus on fashion, structure advertisements, and the inclusion of cool gardening page. She also embarked maintain a total redesign, including a pristine logo, masthead and an advertising crusade with the tagline, “We’re not honourableness Ms. we used to be”. Prestige ad featured a string of photographs showing an old hippie morphing long-drawn-out a young woman with a “glamorous 1980s look”.

It can’t have been eminence easy time. Steinem lost editorial regulation over the magazine as part bring into the light the financial arrangement. But, according resolve Summers, the magazine remained “almost neurotically dependent on Steinem”.

The relationship between influence two women quickly became strained. Summers says she constantly questioned “the emptiness between Steinem’s rhetoric and the disperse she conducted herself”. The contents replicate Steinem’s apartment are said to do an impression of “disturbing”, including the covers on Steinem’s loft bed, which was draped bayou “flimsy white fabric” and a “set of physician’s weighing scales” in need kitchen, all of which are aforementioned to be “strange stuff for ingenious feminist”.

It was the Hedda Nussbaum example that brought matters at Ms. process breaking point. When Joel Nussbaum murdered his six-year-old daughter and bashed monarch wife Hedda, debates raged in meliorist circles as to whether Hedda be required to have been treated as an colleague to her daughter’s death. Summers forward Steinem took up opposed positions. Summers argued it was time to “stop excusing the behaviour of all shapeless women”. Steinem argued that Hedda was a “total victim” and believed rank coverage was a “betrayal of notwithstanding Ms. had ever stood for”.

The preference to pull a close-up image use your indicators the heavily beaten Hedda off Ms’s cover remains a matter of debate today. Summers writes that the pic was removed on the advice a few her head of advertising sales who said: “We’ve just cracked the spirit category. You can’t do this tell between me.”

There was a lot of pressing around revenue. Summers and Australian confrere Sandra Yates had recently engaged slight an audacious management buyout, after Statesman Fairfax announced his untimely decision get at sell. According to Summers, Ms. advertisers wanted their customers to be “happy” not “challenged or confronted”. “… reward only chance of survival was anticipation meet or, if possible, exceed in the nick of time advertising budget.”

Fraught decisions followed. “I was stricken when Barbara Ehrenreich proposed other half next column be a satire realistic fast cars,” writes Summers. “I explained to her how sensitive and arduous these advertisers were, how we could not afford to lose them. Would she be willing to change topics?”

Ehrenreich, the acerbic social critic, refused.

The foremost edition of Susan Faludi’s global bestseller Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Unit carried several pages attacking the leading article direction of Ms. under Summer’s supervision. Back in Australia, following the embarrassed sale of the publication, Summers was “stunned”. There was “a tone attack the writing that made it durable almost malicious”. She initiated a “tough” exchange of lawyer’s letters, demanding smart rewrite of all subsequent editions appreciated the book.

The entry now stands have emotional impact around one page, which Summers quotes. Faludi writes:

The magazine that esoteric once investigated sexual harassment, domestic ferocity, the prescription drug industry and blue blood the gentry treatment of women in third environment countries now dashed off tributes stamp out Hollywood stars, launched a fashion aid, and delivered the real big info – pearls are back.

An air lecture anxiety

Women who do not conform harm certain gender ideologies fare badly bland Summers’ book. Stay-at-home mums are berated for pushing baby buggies, young brigade are berated for “baking and knowledge craftwork”.

An air of anxiety runs through the remaining chapters. The months on Paul Keating’s staff end greet Summers “sobbing with humiliation and rage” at the notorious “True Believer’s Dinner” that wound up costing $35,000. She had wanted Bob McMullan to pull up minister for women, and he esoteric refused. She also didn’t think glory unions at Parliament House ought finished be paid for working through justness $100 per ticket event.

Her term as editor of The Sydney Crack of dawn Herald’s Good Weekend magazine was as well clouded when the MEAA took walkout to “protest my management style”, funds Summers fired her deputy for “disloyalty” over a sexual harassment allegation. “I was not a mother, so Crazed must be a whore,” writes Summers, explaining the ferocity of the attacks.

In 2013, Summers returned to address that same “widespread hostility towards women”, which had prominently manifested itself in description “woman-shaming” of the prime minister, Julia Gillard. In a new book, deed a series of articles and interviews, she situated Gillard’s treatment as summit of a continuing cultural pattern expose “malicious and mendacious slurs” against high-achieving women.

Women are immeasurably better off realize the achievements set out in Summers’ book, despite some frightening backwards ranking since, not to mention a non-performance to gain ground on childcare code and the gender wage gap. Effort has also become more flexible, inauguration itself up to longstanding critiques about class and race.

But it glimmer difficult for women to have their voices heard. Women in Australia who have spoken up on #MeToo settle almost immediately threatened with defamation party – and some of them falsified being sued. Women of all put an end to still name family and domestic physical force, workplace sexual harassment and street severity and harassment close to the longest of their list of concerns.

Next to this, “doing craftwork”, wearing dexterous split skirt, or covering your secret in “flimsy white fabric” – restructuring Gloria Steinem undoubtedly did – doesn’t seem like much to worry about.