| ACL 3016 Working Class Literature Semester 4 2010 Footscray |
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3.3 A lecture/essay by Nathan Hollier |
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1. Introduction My starting question: ‘What can Dorothy Hewett's novel Bobbin Up (an example of working-class writing written by women), tell us about the relationship between relations of gender, on one hand, and relations of class, on the other?' The short answer is that gender and class relations are connected, but not in any essential or wholly commensurate way. The capitalist system is particularly damaging for working-class women, for a variety of reasons, including their being squeezed into, or even out of, low-paying work, while often, at the same time, having to perform a relatively larger load of unpaid domestic labour than their middle- and upper-class sisters. But the capitalist system may benefit middle-, upper- or ruling-class women, politically (facilitating a better lobbying position, for example), materially (higher wages, a better career etc.) and in the domestic sphere (giving them a relative freedom from domestic labour, enabling them to make themselves more personally ‘attractive' and have access to more physically attractive sexual partners etc). If ruling-class women have to give up their (traditional) femininity (at least in the public sphere) to attain this, this ‘loss' may be seen as a small price to pay and may be experienced as a feeling of power, in much the same way that this narrowly ‘masculine' identity is experienced by ruling-class men (see Donaldson and Poynting). These men profess to miss the private sphere, the domestic realm, but they have clearly made a choice or been pushed into believing that the rewards of the implicitly feminine private realm are not for them. It is possible that women as a whole do better under a particular form of capitalism (it should be remembered that capitalism itself is not a monolithic system, cf. welfare state versions and our own neo-liberal version; see Pusey, middle Australia book) while the working class as a whole do worse, cf.:
If non-whites and women have done better, economically, since the 1960s, the working class (which includes women and non-whites) patently have not. The opposite could also be true. Consider the Taliban. And then, this assessment by Naomi Zack, representative of a liberal philosophy, also may not be true for the other groups she mentions. Have non-whites really done better ‘since the 1960s'? Have women? Have some women done better while others have not? Consider the Australian critiques of white middle-class feminism by Jackie Huggins, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and migrant women (see Barbara Brook). So, contrary to Zack's liberal perspective (which ignores the historical and material evidence and draws rigid, unworkable distinctions between ‘women', ‘non-whites' and ‘the working class' as wholly separate groups), there is not some uncomplicated process by which Western capitalism advances, simultaneously improving the lot of all groups within it. While Zack and other contributors to this book are ostensibly writing in the interests of the marginalised, they are in fact adopting a (politically) very conservative and (intellectually) unhelpful stance. But while it is not helpful to say that all women do or could do well under capitalism (the liberal view) or that all women are equally oppressed by capitalism, it can be said that, speaking from a Western perspective at least, all women are oppressed by patriarchy: all women exist in a society in which men, as a group , continue to do much better than women, as a group, and in which the feminine (however that is defined) is not valued as highly as the masculine (see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex ). Arguably, within Western patriarchy, the feminine is the negative Other against which the positive masculine is defined: the masculine is strong, muscular, active, independent, bright, rational; the feminine is weak, passive, demure, and at the same time, dark, unknowable, non-rational or irrational, and untrustworthy. Egs from Shakespeare, especially Othello. The notion of the madonna and the whore, cf. Anne Summers: Damned Whores and God's Police. cf. the relation of the West and the East: the West is perceived as rational, civilised, calm; the East is irrational, uncivilised, out of control, unknowable (‘inscrutible'), mystical. See Edward Said, Orientalism ). So, there are links between gender and class relations, but not essential or wholly commensurate links. While it is possible to identify positive connections between a system of gender relations that exists at a particular time and a system of class relations thats exist at that time, it is not possible to say that these gender relations are an expression of, or are wholly explainable through reference to, class relations; or vice versa . That is, it is possible to say that a system of gender relations reinforces a contemporaneous system of class relations, but these gender relations would reinforce class relations through the specific actions of people in society, actions which would need to be identified and explained. It is also possible, as I've suggested, that a system of gender relations might undermine a system of class relations, and vice versa. And what is meant by ‘liberation from patriarchy' is not self-evident; this will depend on a person's speaking position, informed as that position is by class, race, sexuality, age and other factors, along with the person's gender. Class and patriarchy are systems of oppression that go back to the origins of recorded history in the West. It is not possible to convincingly situate one of these forms of oppression as somehow more primal than the other, to argue that in order to be free of class, for instance, we need first be free of patriarchy, or that in order to be free of patriarchy we must first be free of class. In one sense, women and men are victims of patriarchy (in that all people are forced into more narrow gender roles than they could be and so disconnected from a full connection with humanity); just as the working class and the ruling class are victims of class oppression (in ways outlined by Donaldson and Poynting: members of the ruling class are victims of their own oppression of the employees, they are not the complete human beings that they could be; perhaps it is not possible to be fully at ease with oneself when one's life is overtly or covertly based on class conflict) . [“In pre-capitalist societies there was no separation between work and home, and ‘domestic labour was embedded in the total productive process' (Gilding, 190, citing A. Hamilton, The Liberation of Women: A Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism , Allen & Unwin, London,1978, 26).] R.W. Connell elaborates on the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy in his germinal article (I'm not going to say ‘seminal'): ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism' (from Which Way is Up? Essays on Class, Sex and Culture , George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1983, pp.33-49). 2. Connell's account of the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy
“What concerns us is the dynamic, not its largely unknowable point of departure” (Connell, ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism', 34).
[So a movement away from a narrow materialism]
[So emphasising again the value of a dialectical approach to understanding society and history]
“No form of social power”, he goes on to say, “is written in the genes, or in the fact of culture. The shapes of desire, the bodily senses of masculinity and femininity, the sexual divisin of labour, are all historically constructed. There are social struggles to control conception, birth and child care, which result in historical change. ‘Woman' and ‘man' are social categories as complex, and historically specific, as ‘ruling class' and ‘working class'. If we follow this approach, an understanding of the relation between class structure and sexual power structure must focus on historical change. It is a question of the interplay between the generative processes that produce capitalism and patriarchy, [and] their processes of transformation[, and their tendencies toward crisis]” (Connell, ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism', 38). “The generative processes in patriarchy work not only to mark out gender boundaries (some males are excluded; some – transsexuals – exclude themselves) but also to produce differentiation and domination within them” (Connell, ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism', 41). [It is ruling-class men who most benefit from oppressive gender relations. It is they who create acceptable notions of manhood and womanhood. Social conservatism is put about in part to distract working-class people from their common economic interests, eg Howard and ‘wedge politics'. ‘Respectable working class embrace these values because at some level they want ruling-class approval, cf. middle-class fetishisation of working-class culture as a means of ‘rebellion', eg Norman Mailer's ‘hipster', discussed by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool ]
[“And we need a concept of joint crisis ” (Connell, ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism', 46).] “This [historical process as a whole] has sometimes been theorised as if it were simply the impact of a dynamic capitalism on an inert domestic sphere. But we cannot ignore the reciprocal dynamic . . . the ways family relationships resisted the atomisation o the workforce; the strategic dilemmas created for the state by demands to support the family which conflict with the exigencies of capital accumulation; the struggles to shape the form of the wage as a ‘family wage' which provided an important focus of working-class mobilisation” (Connell, ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism', 47). “How do we understand crisis tendencies in a joint dynamic? It is difficult to formulate the concept of joint crisis without seeming to trespass on the principle of logical autonomy of the two structures” [explain]. “On the one hand we find a process of radicalisation spilling untidily from one realm into another [eg radical feminists working with Marxist inspired political radicals] . . . On the other hand we find crisis tendencies in one structure apparently absorbed by the repressive capacities of the other. [For example:] The student movement of the 1960s made us familiar with the ways a represesively-organised sexuality can dampen the crisis tendencies of capitalism. The sexual liberation movements now face endless examples of the capitalist absorption of opposition to patriarchy. To take just one instance, their growth has been closely followed by cooptation of ‘liberation rhetoric by mass marketing and advertising” (Connell, ‘Crisis Tendencies in Patriarchy and Capitalism', 48 [one of the things we talked about in tutorials the other week – liberation through consumption of the products of the ‘beauty' industry]). Connell summarises:
3. The Historical Context: Class and Gender relations at the time of Bobbin Up What was the nature of the social, or historically specific relationship between gender and class relations at the time when Hewett wrote Bobbin Up , in 1958? It is important to keep this historical context in mind when we're discussing gender or class or any other social relations, and the representation of these relations. We can get a glimpse of 1950s gender roles from the Australian Women's Weekly. As Michael Gilding writes, in this publciation “men were breadwinners and women were housewives” (Gilding, ‘Gender Roles in Contemporary Australia', in Pritchard Hughes, ed., Contemporary Australian Feminism , pp.188-215, 188).
He goes on to say that although he was “ ‘a fairly tolerant fellow, and certainly no Victorian patriarch'” he became disgruntled at the effect of his wife's working on his home life:
The rapid expansion of the market economy during the postwar decades led to “broader changes in the performance of housework” (195). “The implication of advertising was that women should spend more time purchasing goods for domestic consumption (that is, shopping) rather than producing the goods themselves (for example, by preserving or sewing), and that they should use their extra time to achieve higher standards of housework” (Gilding, 195). [This takes place as the industrial economy is shifted to the ‘third world' and the Western economies become more based on consumption]
There was a shift at this time from the notion of the husband as the head of the house to the notion of marriage as a ‘partnership', however, women continued to do the bulk of domestic labour, even when they worked as much as their husbands in the paid economy, and there is evidence to suggest that “marriages framed in terms of partnership were stable only insofar as partnership was in name only” (Gilding, 198). So “ ‘working mothers' undermined the breadwinner/housewife division of the post-war decades. The notion of ‘partnership marriage' emerged as an attempt to resolve new [gender] tensions. It worked up to a point, but it also created tensions of its own” (Gilding, 198). Hewett was writing during a period of unstable gender relations (though gender relations are of course never truly stable) but before the arrival of modern feminism, commonly known as ‘second-wave' feminism because of an earlier wave in the late nineteenth century. The reason why this feminist identity developed when it did is obviously a very difficult one to be confident about answering; but it appears influenced by the unprecedented arrival of a degree of freedom – from the home, child-birth, heterosexual relations and extreme economic disadvantage – which in turn made a form of female community without obvious precedent, possible. (Arguably there is a third wave in the early 1990s, on the back of new demands by white middle-class Western women, see Katie Pritchard Hughes, ‘Feminism for Beginners', in Pritchard Hughes, ed., Contemporary Australian Feminism (second ed), Longman, South Melbourne, 1997; referring to Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfield and Naomi Wolf, as well as Helen Garner (see also in the Aust context Kathy Bail, Catharine Lumby and Virginia Trioli). And perhaps there is a contemporaneous fifth wave could be a critique of second and third wave feminism by non-Western or non-Anglo women, eg Roberta Sykes, Huggins, Moreton-Robinson, Sevgi Kilic etc., whose work has more connection, at the theoretical level at least, with the French feminisms of Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, et al). It is no coincidence, however, that these unstable gender relations coincided with shifts in the nature of capitalist production and so in the nature of class relations. She is writing during a period when Western capitalism was moving through a transition from being the global centre of industrial production to being the global centre of secondary forms of production, and the global centre of consumption (though it had been this for some time). People's class identity was being altered as they were encouraged to think of themselves less as producers than as consumers, and this had implications for gender relations, just as the demands and interests of women, or of dominant groups of women, helped to shape this political and economic process of global capitalist development. Again, in reaching conclusions about the desirability and effectiveness of Hewett's feminism and general political radicalism in Bobbin Up , these social and historical conditions need to be born in mind. 4. Gender and Class in Bobbin Up 4.1 Approaching Bobbin Up : literature as history, literature as philosophy Hewett wrote Bobbin Up novel at a time when she was directly involved in and committed to a philosophy of Marxism. According to Marx, of course, and the Marxism of the Communist Party of Australia in 1958, the social system of capitalism, dominant throughout the Western world, functioned through the exploitation of working-class labour by ruling class capital. As a child of a wealthy West Australian rural family, privately educated and (initially) married to a lawyer, Hewett could not claim a working-class identity in any original sense. But she could aspire to assist the working class in their struggle for emancipation. She made the conscious decision to live and work among the working class for some nine years from the late 1940s, asking Communist Party officials to arrange for her to go and work in the inner-city Sydney spinning mills that later formed the basis for her portrayal of the Jumbuck Mill in Bobbin Up . As she makes clear in her introduction to the Virago edition of her novel, Hewett made a conscious effort to take on the culture of her fellow workers and to be accepted as one of them. It is apparent, then, that though she may not have lain claim to a working-class identity herself, at the time when Bobbin Up was written, she understood politics and personal identity primarily in the Marxist terms of class, and she wanted to assist the working class. Class was for her the crucial factor in the personal formation of identity, as in the social formation of wealth and opportunity. Though Bobbin Up is obviously directly concerned with issues of gender and the particular exploitation of women, and might even be considered, alongside works such as Agnes Smedley's remarkable 1929 Daughter of Earth , a proto-feminist novel, it is clear that at the time of writing it, Hewett had not fully developed the notion of a feminist identity. Suzzane Bellamy, one of the key figures of the women's liberation movement in Australia, has recounted that when she first heard about a meeting being held to discuss the oppression of women her and her friends, who were all active in the campaign to stop the Vietnam War, assumed that this would be a meeting about women in Vietnam (consider also comments by Graham Freudenberg re the W.E.L.). For complex historical and cultural reasons, and despite a long history of movements for female emancipation, it wasn't until the end of the 1960s, some ten years after Bobbin Up , that a feminist identity, in the sense that we have came to understand the term, emerged: that is, the notion of one's identity being based first and foremost on one's gender, and more particularly, of one's experience of oppression within a patriarchal society. This understanding of identity was simply not available for Hewett in 1958. Hewett moved away from the slum areas of Sydney and later left the CPA in 1968, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She became strongly influenced by feminism and very critical of the Communist Party, its dogmatic Marxisms and the oppressive and repressive gender relations that prevailed in the party and the Australian working class (Moore interview). Having said this, though, she never overtly denied the continuing importance of class and of the material relations of power with which Marxism was primarily preoccupied. She retained a fascination with the (Communist) Party as a symbol of transgressive politics (see for example her 2001? play Nowhere ) and in her last years engaged in powerful polemics against economic rationalism and its cultural implications (dead heart and its children commit suicide). The point, then, regarding relations between class and gender in this novel and in Hewett's work generally, is that her perspective and identity shifted over time, and not in straightforward or easily interpretable ways. In her later years she was most concerned to avoid having labels, which she felt tended to be inherently reductive, placed upon her (cf. Lever's description of her as a ‘recalcitrant individualist' and her own view of herself as an anarchist). This means that when we come to consider Bobbin Up we cannot, even if we wanted to, simply assert that the novel is primarily concerned with class or with gender or some other identifiable basis of Hewett's identity. As readers and critics we need to try to find some balance, between on the one hand simply co-opting the author for our own political, cultural or intellectual interests, as tends to happen when we view literature as history, and on the other hand naively accepting the author's views and statements at a particular moment, as final, as can happen when we view literature solely as philosophy. (As John McLaren has noted, the study of literature falls between the disciplines of philosophy and history. See his Introduction to Australian Literature ). 4.2 Hewett's Achievement: Bobbin Up 's Classed and Gendered Poetics As already mentioned, the central philosophy to which Hewett subscribed at the time of writing Bobbin Up was a form of Marxism. For this reason, and because she lived amongst, worked with and was accepted as part of a working-class community, it seems reasonable to suggest that Bobbin Up is in important senses a working-class novel: written about and for the working class if not necessarily ‘by' a member of it (though we should remember that it was published by the Australasian Book Society, a radical working-class cultural institution). The great strength of Marxist philosophy is its capacity to analyse, explain and predict individual actions in terms of the operations of a total system, the system of capitalism. The great difficulty for Marxism, I would argue, is the difficulty its proponents have in reconciling this structural or systemic analysis with the simultaneous existence, recognised by most important Marxist scholars, of human agency and difference. As a child of the Enlightenment age, Marx tended to privilege reason over unreason, the scientific over the ‘natural', ‘emotional' and the aesthetic, the material over the intangible, the European over the oriental and the indigenous. Marx was also, needless to say, no feminist, in anything like the accepted modern version of the word. Marxist intellectuals, particularly since the Second World War, have been concerned to find ways of overcoming this apparent weakness of masculinist Eurocentric rationalism within the Marxist tradition. Despite the contribution of Connell and others, it is still the case that in much Marxism, as H. Hartmann put it in 1979: “marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism” (in Connell, ‘Patriarchy and Capitalism', 35). I would argue that in Bobbin Up , Hewett's nascent interest in the particular identity, experience and desire of female workers, moves her in a not fully conscious way towards an exploration of the deficiencies of the Communist Party of Australia's totalising reductionist Marxism; though as she recognises (and states in the Virago introduction), elements of this Communist philosophy remains present in her text (eg of the depiction of the Soviet sattelite, though as can be gleaned from a work by Lindsay Barrett, this is not as unrealistic as it might seem to us now). Hewett successfully incorporates a critique of the social system and a portrait of the specific language, experience, desire and emotions of the culture she has become part of. In depicting this culture honestly and with sensitivity for the struggles and pains of its members, Hewett is able to make an emotional impact on the reader, to offer a sense of classed cultural difference, and to achieve an aesthetically as well as intellectually effective work. The central way that Hewett critiques the class structure of her society in Bobbin Up is through the authorial focus on a group of women linked by their employment at the Jumbuck Mill. As Stephen Knight details in his comprehensive discussion of Bobbin Up as a working-class text, the avoidance of a single individual hero can be seen as a fundamental break away from the philosophy of individualism central to capitalist society. Hewett reveals very effectively how the unique needs and desires of her characters, the way they live, what they consume, how they interact, the limitations they experience, are all factors influenced, fundamentally, by the conditions of their working lives. As Hewett puts it in the Virago introduction:
Later she recounts how at the end of the novel: “they stay inside the mill, part of its huge and overpowering darkness. Its sinister silence becomes an extension of their bodies and their lives” (xvii). So the mill stands as the central symbol of the novel, and the central metaphor of the girls' lives, just as, within Marxist theory, it is the relationship between labour and capital within the labour market, that determines all of the other relationships in society (cf the mine in Germinal ). Within Marxism, the life of the individual is fundamentally and inescapably shaped by the system of capitalism, and this is then a very effectively communicated ‘truth' of this novel. In addition, though, to this awareness of and focus on the class system, and the place of some of the most exploited women within that system, there is also an obvious interest in the uniquely gendered forms of oppression her female characters face and in their political, and intellectual, but also sensual, aesthetic and emotional (that is, traditionally ‘feminine') responses to this. As such, Hewett begins to examine modes of being and of politics not readily acceptable within the (narrowly materialist, Marxist) radicalism of her moment. The women of Bobbin Up are oppressed in a number of ways. They receive only 75% of the male wage (which would not have been very much anyway, since they are working in one of the least skilled sections of the economy). There is no government-funded support for those who are single parents. There is very little government housing available for those who are poor and living in unsatisfactory, unsafe or unhygienic boarding houses. Their union is controlled by male conservatives who are not interested in fighting for the rights of employees. The women are subjected to physical and verbal abuse and discrimination of a sexual nature in their workplace (eg of Ken and Dawnie). Like most of the men in Smedley's Daughter of Earth (which I keep mentioning because it's a fantastic novel), the majority of those in Bobbin Up are shown to believe that they have a right to hit their wives or female partners, and a right to demand sexual gratification from them (Jess and Bert, p.82, Vic and Mais, and again, Ken genuinely believes he has been hard done by with Dawnie). Men are intolerant of women and believe them to be unruly and embarrassing if they are loud in public (both Len and Stan are like this to Beth and Nell, respectively. When Beth yells out to Dawnie for example, Len says “Shut up for Christ's sake. You're not out in the bloody bush now. You always make a show of a man”, p.24). On a number of occasions, men are shown as siding with their mothers rather than with their wives or lovers (egs), and as believing that any expression of sexuality ‘cheapens a woman' (case of Roy and Shirl, case of the biblical word, ‘harlot'). The women are generally a bit frightened of their husbands or lovers. Even with Beth and Nell, the women based on Hewett, their main way of dealing with their male partner is to appease him. They are always worried about Him getting angry and frustrated (partly this may be because Hewett was in fact more educated than Les Flood [and also Lilley]). When Len and Kennie kiss their respective love interests they do it aggressively, as if to avoid any possibility of rejection [cf. Puberty Blues , Black Diamonds and Dust ]. It is largely taken for granted by the women of Bobbin Up that part of their function in life is to reproduce (even bonus-happy Mais, whom, it seems, didn't want kids, has two of them). Women are shown as wanting to have children primarily because they crave affection and a degree of intimacy that their male partners are unable to give them (at the end of the chapter on Jessie and Bert and their daughter Linnie and Reggie (87), Hewett writes of the Home for Fallen Girls on the opposite side of the river, where “The fallen girls lay quietly, their little red hands, chapped with washing soda, folded gently above the sheets, their institution nighties buttoned tightly up to their necks, dreaming of sweethearts and marriage and a fat baby nuzzling for love at their narrow little breasts”). So, [as in Daughter of Earth ,] the picture of gender relations that ultimately emerges in Bobbin Up is one in which women are part of the property of a man's world. Gender roles are relatively fixed and pretty narrow – women are mothers and nurturers, or, if they are corrupted by having a sexuality, run the risk of being thought of as ‘harlots'. Men are ideally, though not in practice, strong, rugged and independent, and if they go off the rails by hitting the booze, what Frank Hardy used to refer to as a ‘battle with the gargle', or by leaving the wife and kids or whatever, it is because a woman has driven them to it (egs of Vic and Mais again, but also Nell and Stan, she's having to placate him all the time). [cf the male gender roles evident in Goodfellow's Poems for a Dead Father , or Cornelius's My Sister Jill ] A big difference between Hewett's novel and that of Agnes Smedley's 1929 text, however, is that the women of Bobbin Up , while being oppressed, are also capable of loving and, particularly, of taking pleasure in loving and in sexual relations. One of the attractive things about this novel is Hewett's poetic sensuality: there are many passages that give a sense of the joy of physical contact or of bodily sensation (eg. Beth and Len making love in chapter 2; or Jessie commenting on her coming home to see her son Maxie mowing the lawn (78-9): How wonderful it was to turn into your own street, to hear the lawnmower whirring, the gentle rustle of the sprinkler on the hydrangeas, to smell the swathes of new-mown grass steamy in the sunlight, and see young Maxie, shirtless, the sweat trickling down his smooth, bare chest, pushing back his fair hair under the spattered shadows of the old palm tree. – perhaps this was partly because, as Dorothy told me, Hewett had had bad eyesight). Female characters in the novel are capable of being very strong and of sticking up for themselves (Nell, but also Dawnie, even Mais, Peggy, the mother of Peggy and Jeanie[?], and Olga, who fights off old Hughie and who has a lover). The strike at the end of the novel is an expression of this female solidarity [eg? ‘Old Betty', p.212, other?], and if, as Hewett has noted, it is an historically unrealistic event, it should also be kept in mind that there was no feminist movement by which to provide her with an alternative model of action or a language of liberation. In a sense she had to look to the working-class movement as a model of liberation (not being informed about the struggle of Gandhi and the Indians, cf. Smedley). The female characters of Hewett's novel are shown as being capable of manipulating existing gender relations to their own ends (eg of Dorrie and the American soldiers, or even of the various ‘evil' mothers in law). In the case of Mais, a woman is shown as being capable of controlling and standing over her male partner, and of rejecting the motherly role altogether. This is not to say that Mais is painted as an attractive character but at least Hewett holds out the possibility that this type of independence is possible. Women remain victims in Bobbin Up , but it is fair to say they have a greater degree of agency than they have in Smedley's Daughter of Earth . Hewett recognises that women and men (and particularly working-class women and men) are victims of traditional forms of gender relations, of patriarchy, and that these gender relations are exacerbated within the existing capitalist system: Eg of Ken and Dawnie in the hotel room: “She fought him grimly, silently, with nails and teeth, and because he didn't want to hurt her , she escaped to the other side of the room” (44). The author stresses here that he didn't want to hurt her; that in some way he is doing this against his own will, because he thinks it's what's expected of him: as he states immediately after this incident: “Most fellers worth their salt'd hold you down an' do you anyway, once they got this far” (44). A further example is that of the men at the dance attended by Patty and Val (97): “The males strutted and whistled at the doorway, unsuccessfully hiding a terrible sense of their own inadequacy”. Then there is the case of Nell's friend and comrade old Bill (129), who states that even though he is in a physically damaging job in a foundry, this is too much a part of his masculine identity, and he is too closely connected to his mates, for him to be able to leave: “It's part of a man's pride in ‘isself. How could I give up and get old and go to work in some pissy peanut factory”. [In her interview with Nicole Moore included in this week's reading, there is an exchange on the masculine nature of the working class movement:
Hewett again states here her recognition that men and women are victims of patriarchal ideology and social relations. Contemporaries of Hewett such as Amirah Inglis and Zelda D'Aprano, who were also members of the CPA because they believed that party offered the most enlightened theoretical stance on gender, have in recent years expressed their frustration and resentment at the unreconstructedly masculine or male-chauvinist practice that existed in the Party. Pauline Armstrong's book on Frank Hardy represents a similar attempt to criticise this masculinist culture. Given that Hewett recognised in Bobbin Up and clearly still recognises now the faults of the CP and the working-class generally in relation to gender issues, you might expect her to support Armstrong's case. But Hewett objected to Armstrong's book on Hardy.] Hewett presents female identity as a positive thing and as a form of identity, or subjectivity, that is wholly different from and incommensurate with that of the male. In this stressing of a positive female difference, Hewett actually anticipates a (mainly French) form of feminist theory and politics that was not really developed by Australian feminists until the late 1970s. Where Smedley's central character, Marie Rogers, largely attempts to deny her femininity, to become like a man, to argue against the oppression of the female on the purely logical grounds set down by men (thereby defining herself in society as a man and in some ways removing the basis of her nascent or unformed feminist project), Hewett celebrates (traditional) ‘feminine' characteristics of sensuality, unruliness, earthiness (being natural, emotional, fertile), while not denying women the use of reason (Nell is by far the most intellectual of all the characters in the novel). Women are able to appreciate the masculine (Nell's being comforted by the smell of Stan's armpits). The moon is constantly appearing in the night sky, as though watching over the lives of the women (the moon is a traditional symbol of femininity, the feminine Other to the masculine sun). Hewett's feminine, then, does not seek to replicate the male and does not thereby implicitly define the female as lacking masculinity (like these later French poststructuralists, Hewett's project could be seen as proposing a challenge to Freudian and Lacanian notions of the centrality of the phallus [figuratively for Lacan] in the formation of identity). This femininity is representative of a degree of self-confidence that Smedley's characters, particularly Marie Rogers, lack. The pamphlet, Bobbin Up , produced by Nell and her husband, is also explicitly designed to avoid the dry economistic rationales for action that were in vogue within the CPA and other communist parties around the world at that time, to try to provide an emotional connection with the female mill workers and a cultural rather than simply scientific basis for political action. So, to the extent that Hewett's novel provides a positive and self-defining female identity and a form and content that undermines masculine rationality, I would contend that it represents a progression within feminist politics, on from Smedley's representation of gender relations in Daughter of Earth . There are though two further things that should be said about this. Firstly, there are some important reasons why Hewett is able to present a more positive and independent feminine identity than Smedley was. By all accounts Hewett had a very difficult and dramatic life (she attempted suicide at nineteen for example) though she probably did not face the same degree of grinding poverty and oppression that Smedley did. Hewett had greater access to education and, perhaps because of her middle-class background, felt at home in the public sphere, in speaking publicly. [So you come back to the tension between external and internal causes, between history and philosophy, objectivity and subjectivity.] 5. Conclusion Bobbin Up is a novel which makes a unique contribution to the working-class political movement and the still not existent feminist movement, because its author brought with her a knowledge not only of the imperatives of Marxism but of the imperative to challenge existing cultural mores [the novel contains a protean realisation of the connection between material and cultural relations of power]. Hewett rejects the economism and moral conservatism of the CPA and its defenders (the Old Left), seeing these as contributing to the personal and political difficulties of wc women and men. On the other hand, her novel reveals the interconnectedness of class and feminist politics, and an awareness of the potential importance of the working-class movement to women's desires for liberation. Hewett challenges the view that women are powerless victims of patriarchy, and moves toward the espousal of a feminist politics that avoids opposing the traditional rationalism of patriarchy on its own terms. Bobbin Up consititutes an historically important feminist critique of capitalist patriarchy. The main characters in the novel are women (this in itself makes it significant for its time). Hewett depicts the socially enacted connections, or the synergy, between the gender relations and class relations of late 1950s urban Australia. The women are shown to be oppressed by patriarchy and by the capitalist system. The form of capitalism that appears in the novel is shown to be consistent with a particularly undesirable form of patriarchy: this capitalism is based on narrow individualism, materialism, rationalism, on traditionally masculine qualities. (Having said this, to a certain extent Hewett perhaps buys into this rationalism and fetishisation of technology in her advancement of the Soviet ideal.) Hewett portrays capitalism as inconsistent with traditional femininity: communalism, spirituality, the non-rational, the sensual. This is not to say that the model of feminine identity advanced in the novel is simply one of traditional femininity: clearly, while Hewett recognises the social need for traditionally feminine, nurturing values, forms of behaviour and ways of being, what she desires is a female identity that is inclusive of these values and this way of being but is nevertheless at the same time based on political and intellectual liberation. * My relationship with Dorothy and what she was like? Her courage, excessiveness, lack of concern for the insignificant (the material), her passion? Nathan Hollier, 11 May 2005.
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