Introduction: ‘Choice’ or ‘risk’ biography?

Introduction

The puzzle Beck sets out to address with his notion of Risk Society is why ‘the structure of social inequality in the developed societies displays a surprising stability’, yet ‘the living conditions of the population have changed dramatically’ (Beck in Woodman 2009: 248) and ‘questions concerning inequality are no longer perceived and politically handled as class questions’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 30).

In the 1950s and 1960s the family wage brought the Australian dream within the reach of working class as well as middle class men. Most could be ‘workers, fathers, sportsmen, beer drinkers, home handymen’, although women's role was confined to ‘full-time housewives and mothers’ (White 1992: 165). Today the working class is more fragmented into those who might still dream but have little chance of owning a house and car, and the aspirationals whose scramble into prosperity requires large mortgages and two incomes.

Introduction

A number of Brett and Moran's (2006: 325) younger interviewees did not see Australia as a ‘national community where bonds between people mattered’. Dora, living in the bohemian inner city on unemployment benefits, had neither a sense of entitlement nor of obligation, because she had no sense of society as a set of reciprocal obligations: ‘Dora simply saw being unemployed as an option for individuals to consider, a choice living in Australia made available’ (Brett and Moran 2006: 226–9). People identified with their breastfeeding or mothers' group, their nightclub or sporting club, as a ‘community’ that would look after its own (Brett and Moran 2006: 275–6, 164, 130).

Those trained in political philosophy and sociology, or who have merely spent their adult lives being ‘good citizens’ by following current affairs, making informed voting decisions and perhaps being members of a political party, sometimes despair at such a lack of social connection and political awareness. This chapter seeks a more positive reading, hopeful of finding potentially new engagements in politics (broadly defined) — more fleeting, more local, more intimate (although sometimes more global) — and based on individual freedoms or abstract ideals rather than ingrained responses to the ‘totem’ issues that divide the baby-boomer generation.

Young Australians express a discourse of equality or sameness, for example in relation to gender, class and — to a lesser extent — culture and sexuality, while experiencing and living material realities of difference deriving from these structural factors. Young people claim to live in a world of gender equality, even as they continue to cherish performances of gender difference. They (and indeed their parents) do not understand the world in terms of class relations, but proclaim that everyone is ‘the same’, even as they are aware of fine distinctions in economic resources and cultural capital. Race and ethnic-based disadvantage is explained as either intolerance on the part of the mainstream and/or individual failure on the part of the marginalised.

These findings, concerning the tensions between a discourse of equality and a reality of difference, arose out of my project to explore changes in young people's experience and understanding of gender relations in the light of changes won in part by feminist activism and circumscribed in the main by globalising economies and neoliberal polities. Based on a comparison of Anne Summers' study of young women in 1970 with my sample of young people in 2000–2006, my first comparison was intergenerational.

The first questionnaire was used for the school sample and, without the life story, for the university students and parents. Question 3.1a ‘What does “feminism” mean to you?’ was added in 2005, as I became increasingly aware of a widespread lack of knowledge concerning feminism, either negatively or positively imagined. In those schools where students asked me what feminism was, I answered that there were many definitions but a popular one was ‘people who believe that men and women should have the same opportunities or be treated the same/equally’. Although minor problems had emerged with other questions (for example, many parents in particular noted ‘books’ as a major source of feminist ideas), I decided not to revise the standard questionnaire, thus retaining consistency across the samples.

The second questionnaire was adapted from the original version in consultation with Karen Walters of Inner City Youth Services, specifically for the early school leavers who are clients of youth services. This questionnaire was used for all the South Australian youth services samples, which included questionnaires distributed to sexuality youth services and by word of mouth. Where the standard questionnaire had a four point scale, from agree strongly to disagree strongly (with a ‘no opinion/don't know’ option), the youth services questionnaire only has ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘don't know’. As the alternative version reduced comparability across samples and I received criticisms from some respondents who felt the questions were too colloquial, I reverted to the original questionnaire for subsequent youth service samples (in Victoria), without apparent problems with comprehension.

Introduction

The young women's and men's life stories discussed in Chapter One reveal that, in many relationships, a good deal of emotion work will be needed to connect the female stories of romance to the male stories of sex, before, after and during marriage. These essays also hinted at the unequal distribution of emotional capacities needed to negotiate such complex relationships. Chapter Two explored intergenerational changes, suggesting mothers have bequeathed their daughters a progressive and empowering narrative of changed gender relations but fathers have not prepared their sons in the same way. My claim for a disjunction between expectations in intimate relationships and the emotional literacy brought to the project by each partner is the topic of this chapter. Biographers are more or less self-aware, and more or less reflexive, in assessing the intersection of their ambitions with society's resources and constraints (Adams 2006: 514-6; Adkins 2003: 25).

As the comparison between Anne Summers' essayists and mine revealed, if anything young women today are more committed to marriage and motherhood than their mothers were (see Chart 1.1, Chapter One). The difference is not in the desire to have children but in the desire to combine this with paid work, a challenge for which their parents' experiences provide little modelling (Andres and Wyn 2010: 230).

Introduction

In my first interviews with women of the baby-boomer generation for my book Living Feminism (1997), I asked ‘How have the lives of women changed as a result of the women's movement?’ Several interviewees began to sketch their answers and then added, ‘You must talk to my daughter.’ These mothers were proud of, and a little awed by, daughters who were apprenticed jewellers, in the police force, who believed they could do anything. Because they reached for their daughters' stories to highlight the changes in their own lives, I began asking each interviewee to compare her mother's, her own and her daughter's life and opportunities (see Bulbeck 1997: 9). I also decided to interview some of the daughters, asking them to reflect on the differences between their mother's generation and their own. And I decided to write another book, based on the experiences of these young women who believed they had inherited the whole wide world.

Background to the Research: The future is female (is it?)

Young interviewees in my ‘equality biographies’ research project, Carina and Verity, assert their belief in gender equality. They do this in the face of an older generation of feminists telling them otherwise: ‘our lit teacher, Mrs Lake’ and Verity's mother, Jane, an academic who has taught women's studies. As another young woman writes in her questionnaire:

The research project that yielded these comments was framed in the mid-1990s. At the time, a ‘generation debate’ raged between so-called ‘second wave’ (women's liberationist or baby-boomer) feminists and their putative daughters, or ‘third wave’ ‘Gen X’ feminists. Young third wave feminists celebrated a diversity of glamorous, sexy, powerful women as opposed to the ‘dowdy’ ‘politically correct’ ‘fully down-for-the-feminist-cause’ second wavers (Walker 1995: xxxi). Echoed by Carina and Verity, young feminists advocated ‘power feminism’ to counter what they saw as second wave ‘victim feminism’.