Introduction: Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi

The cross-fertilisation of ideas that is evident in earlier chapters, particularly in Chapters 3 and 4, is also clear in this study, which took place before the Gender Analysis Project actually commenced. We include the chapter here because it explores the question of gender mainstreaming in ways which dovetail with questions we raise in the earlier chapters, including whether gender mainstreaming can ‘transform’ policies and policy development organisations.

In 2004 Patricia Todd and Joan Eveline undertook a public inquiry into the gender pay gap in Western Australia, commissioned by the incumbent Labor Government. This chapter is from that study. It analyses Australian gender pay gap inquiries conducted over the past decade to identify those components with transformative potential in the context of Australian industrial relations regulations and conditions. It provides examples of when and how policymakers have deployed such components, and when they have not.

Interestingly, gender mainstreaming was the policy technique being mooted in only one of those inquiries, a suggestion that indeed has not since been initiated by the government involved. Rather than offering a study of how to close the gender pay gap through gender mainstreaming, therefore, this chapter asks what components we would wish to include if gender mainstreaming were used. Our earlier Chapters 2 and 3 introduced readers to the notion that gender mainstreaming is deeply contested as concept and practice – that it means different things in different locales – and this includes whether and when policymakers use it, how they use it and how they represent ‘the problem’ they hope to deal with (Chapter 5).

Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

As with the previous chapter this article was written in the lead-up to the commencement of the Gender Analysis Project. It pursues the increasing controversy about whether or not gender mainstreaming ought to be considered a victory for feminist reformers. This debate was generated in part due to the proliferation of gender mainstreaming initiatives in organisations and states with free market agendas and the associated removal of women's policy units and positive action initiatives. Those who believed that mainstreaming was in fact resistant to free market liberalism tended to argue that the expansion of state activities associated with the reform challenged the neoliberal focus on small government.

Our contribution to this debate emphasises the need to recognise that neoliberalism is not anti-state but that it encourages a particular kind of state, one that steers from a distance. Hence there is no necessary tension between neoliberalism and forms of gender mainstreaming that focus on strengthening the political arm of government.

We also develop the hypothesis that the degree of resistance or complicity between gender mainstreaming and neoliberalism is related to the form of gender mainstreaming (or gender analysis) introduced. Following from Chapter 1 the case is made that a ‘differences’ model of gender analysis rests on individualist premises that provide some congruence with neoliberalism, while a ‘gender relations’ approach is more likely to be resistant.

Introduction: Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline

This article was written prior to the commencement of the Gender Analysis Project, discussed in the Introduction. Reflecting Bacchi's policy background, it focuses primarily on connections between how policy is theorised and divergent models of gender analysis. This focus remains a theme throughout the chapters to follow, especially in Chapter 5. Eveline's influence is apparent towards the end of the article, where reference is made to ways of engaging policy workers in the organisational change process (see Eveline and Booth 2002; Eveline and Harwood 2002). Her breakthrough contribution to rethinking asymmetrical power relations between women and men as ‘the politics of advantage’ is also introduced (see Eveline 1994). The authors' shared commitment to recognising power as a generative force is captured in the term ‘gendering’ (Eveline 2005).

Bacchi's primary purpose in the article is to alert readers to the existence of different frameworks for gender analysis and to suggest that, in terms of prospects for progressive change, the framework adopted matters. She identifies conceptual limitations in the dominant mode of gender analysis, which she calls a ‘differences approach’. She also explores the potential for change in the Netherlands ‘gender relations’ approach, which starts from the premise that there are inequitable power relations between women and men.

Bacchi's major concern with both these models is the continuing tendency to consider policy as a reaction to the ‘problem’ of gender inequality.

We decided to produce this compilation of articles, in the main published elsewhere, because we thought it worthwhile to reflect on developments in our thinking in connection with a large research project on gender analysis of policy. Over four years, as laid out in more detail in the Introduction, we were the Chief Investigators for an ARC-funded Linkage grant project to assist in the design of gender analysis procedures for the South Australian and Western Australian public sectors. In the lead-up to and over the course of the project (referred to as the Gender Analysis Project or GAP) we collaborated closely in the production of papers which became articles that traced the ‘learnings’ generated by the project. We are grateful to the various journal publishers for the opportunity to reprint these articles. Previously published articles are listed at the end of this preface.

Because the published articles necessarily include essential background information, there will inevitably be some repetition. Some themes also reappear in several chapters. We hope that this repetition does not prove onerous to readers. All articles were approved for publication by the relevant industry partners.

Reviewing the published material, and again in close collaboration, we decided that there was something to be learned from examining the themes developed in these articles and from considering how our specific theoretical backgrounds shaped these themes. In the process of undertaking this task we realised that some of the underlying theoretical premises that grounded these analyses might well be less visible to readers than to us.

This collection of essays establishes the claim that it is unwise to think about ‘gender mainstreaming’ or ‘gender analysis’ as sets of procedures that necessarily make useful changes when they are put into place as policies. Rather we direct attention to the on-the-ground political deliberations (at every level of social interaction) that affect what gets done and who gets to do it. It is the ‘doings’, the practices, that generate long-term learning and commitment, and that create the possibility that gender analysis can have some impact over time on the asymmetrical power relations between women and men (Chapters 7, 10 and 13).

The implications for policy development are significant. One overriding message is the need to create the time and space for public servants both to reflect upon the nature of ‘gender analysis’ and to participate actively in applying it. As Chapter 12 makes explicit, in the GAP project those who were personally engaged in the work of gender analysis were the ones most likely to come to see its relevance. As also noted in that chapter, those policy workers tended, in the main, to be women with lesser institutional authority. It follows, as argued there, that, if gender analysis is to become a meaningful and useful equality initiative, all policymakers, especially those in positions of institutional authority, need to ‘do’ gender analysis.

As part of this ‘doing’, there is need for reflection on the concepts and categories produced as part of the gender analysis exercise, for example, ‘gender’, ‘equality’, ‘difference’.

Introduction: Joan Eveline and Carol Bacchi

A fervent debate in mainstreaming policy surrounds the question of whether ‘gender’ or ‘diversity’ should provide the main focus. Lurking behind that debate is the discursive practice of ‘commatisation’, highlighted by Mary O'Brien (1984) as the definitive blind spot of equal opportunity policy. With commatisation, the policy emphasis goes onto the disadvantages of ‘women (comma) blacks (comma) gays (comma) …’ etc. etc. and leaves the advantages available to the unspoken norm (white, male, straight etc.) hidden from view (Eveline 1994).

Although policymakers have tried replacing ‘women’ with ‘gender’ and the remainder of the commatised groups with ‘diversity’, the old dangers of commatisation remain. Most public servants who develop and implement policy still think ‘gender’ means ‘women’ (Chapters 3, 4 and 5), rather than an attributional process that maintains and obscures a masculinised ordering of privilege. And most of the groups who find themselves in the ‘diversity’ category see gender used invariably in white ethnocentric and heteronormative ways which obscure and sustain the cultural privileges that white heterosexual women take for granted in white racist homophobic societies.

Whether and how gender mainstreaming can adequately address this problem of commatisation was a key design question for our gender analysis project. As part of that design we initiated a PhD study dedicated to examining the interface between gender analysis and issues raised by Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.

Catherine Helen Spence was a powerful and persuasive public speaker. She had, in a sense, been practising speaking for most of her adult life. She recalled a moment in the 1850s when she was in her late twenties – a wonderfully backhanded moment – when she began to sing while she was doing the ironing. Her four year-old nephew ‘burst out with “Don't sing, auntie; let me hear the voice of your words.“’ So she abandoned melody and recited Wordsworth. But this was, as she herself was to observe, exercising her gifts exclusively for ‘home consumption’. Law and custom, she continued,

Historian Marilyn Lake has observed, ‘Oratory was a masculine performance; womanliness demanded a soft voice and winning smiles’. Perhaps Catherine Spence was the exception which proved the rule.

Once launched in the 1870s, Miss Spence won acclaim and affection for her ‘rare gifts of speech and intellect’. At home in Adelaide, a reporter was to praise a sermon he heard her deliver, approving her slight Scots accent, her clear, firm voice and her unselfconsciousness.

‘You may try, but you can never imagine, what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl’. This cry of anguish blazes from the pages of George Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda. Spence quoted it in an article on Eliot's life and works; she paused at several points which suggest parallels with her own life, observing that the sentiment best expressed the condition Mary Ann Evans experienced in her youth. Since Spence considered ‘the province of genius’ to be not so much superlative creativeness, but rather ‘to call forth a responsive spark from the souls with which it is in communion’, Deronda's mother's outburst could stand as her own. For 30 years, Spence defied social convention to work as a journalist, but she did so without acknowledgement, recognition, or even much in the way of financial return.

The patriarchal social order which so constrained her attempt to maintain her independence – to become her own breadwinner, while retaining freedom from the double subjection of women of the working class – made a ‘lady journalist’ a contradiction in terms. Margaret Stevenson, wife of one of the Register's earlier directors, might have contributed not only poems but also political articles to that paper; Spence might have had occasional pieces printed in her brother-in-law's South Australian; but both sheltered behind initials and pen-names.

By the 1890s, Spence's voice already had an established place in South Australia's public affairs. She could, on occasion, be heard by anyone worshipping in the Unitarian Christian Church in Wakefield Street. A member of a district school board, and of the State Children's Council, she could ask questions and proffer advice in committee meeting rooms. As a regular contributor to one of the colony's daily newspapers, the Register, her ideas could reach far more people than she was likely to encounter face-to-face. Yet, at that time, most South Australians heard her voice indirectly, through her articles in the press, or muffled by the sheltering walls of the church and committee room. She was still susceptible to descriptions like Geoffrey Blainey's, delivered from a vantage point in the public sphere, as ‘the veiled maid of Adelaide’.

To have made even as much of an inroad as Spence had by that time into the world of men, might well have seemed enough to anyone in their sixties, but it was far from enough for Catherine Spence. Her voice was to be heard on platforms, in meeting halls throughout South Australia – indeed across south-eastern Australia, and the United States. She was to speak where people could hear her directly, where she risked the immediate impact of interjections, scoffing and jeering, but where, instead, she would win love and acclaim for her persuasiveness and her power as a public speaker.

When Spence first began to write she said, ‘the novel was the line of least resistance’. She was referring to the world that she had first learned about from her mother and her Scottish school-mistress, in which her everyday environment took on colour and adventure from reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott. She had buried herself in that world during her years as a shy, impoverished adolescent, in strange, uncongenial surroundings. The Spences' membership of the South Australian Mechanics’ Institute and its library had enabled her to extend her reading with the work of English writers of her own time. She introduced the hero of her first published novel by presenting him, in the words of the critic Frederick Sinnett, ‘talking modern literature, and displaying a highly cultivated mind with a promptitude and pertinacity frightful to contemplate’. The authors he mentioned included not only Shakespeare, Scott and Byron, but also Dickens and Thackeray, whose novels were still reaching the colony in serial instalments in British periodicals at the time when Spence was creating him.

This was a world in which women were already claiming a voice in the public sphere. The 1840s, when the novel was the dominant literary form of writing in English, saw the publication of novels by each of the three Brontë sisters. In 1853 J. M. Ludlow observed despondently ‘the fact that at this particular moment of the world's history the very best novels in several great countries happened to have been written by women’.

In November 1839 a passenger ship, Palmyra, sailed slowly up a creek until it reached a jumble of temporary buildings that constituted a port. Surrounded by dismaying mangrove swamps, the passengers disembarked and organised themselves and their possessions into port carts. Their drive, along a dusty road through sparse, sunburnt grass, in a wind blowing directly from the north as though from a furnace, eventually jolted them across a meagre river into a settlement of broad, straight streets, lined with tents, interspersed with houses of brick, wood, earth or stone. This was Adelaide – the centre of a three-year-old British colony established on the coastal plain of Gulf St Vincent in South Australia. Among the passengers scrambling out of the port carts was a red-headed young woman, undoubtedly sunburnt, and appalled by her surroundings. ‘When we sat down on a log in Light square, waiting till my father brought the key of the wooden house in Gilles street, in spite of the dignity of my 14 years just attained, I had a good cry’. This was Catherine Helen Spence.

Nearly three-quarters of a century later, in October 1905, in a church school-room in Adelaide, a public gathering celebrated Catherine Spence's 80th birthday. At that party, South Australia's chief justice proclaimed her:

During her long life Catherine Helen Spence sought to make her voice heard in a world dominated by men. She penned editorials, delivered sermons and spoke at public meetings both in Australia, in the United States and in Britain. Both by her own example and in her support for women's cause, she sought ‘to unbridle the tongues of women’. Although she was well-known in her day, indeed renowned as the ‘Grand Old Woman of Australia’ at her death in 1910, knowledge of her life of achievements slipped in subsequent years. When in 1985, Susan Magarey published her prize-winning biography of Spence, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, Spence had become largely forgotten. Unbridling did more than recover the story of Spence's life and work, it suggested new approaches to Australian history. It was the first biography of a first-wave Australian feminist written by a second-wave feminist historian. As such it inspired and set an example of feminist biography and history which has seen a great outpouring of feminist historical and literary scholarship in biographies of Australian feminist activists and of Australian women writers; Spence herself was of course both a writer and a political activist. Unbridling must also be located as an influential early text in the development of Australian feminist history in the last three decades. In this and her other work, Susan Magarey has achieved much in the on-going campaigns to ensure that women's voices and perspectives are heard in public debate.

Spence was in her mid-50s when she composed A Week in the Future, her vision of a co-operative society in 1988, a century from the year in which she wrote. Her dream of its educational practices owed something both to discussions she had listened to in England in the 1860s, and to developments in education in South Australia, but she had carried those ideas much further than many of her contemporaries would have considered possible, or even desirable. In a period when South Australians were still arguing about whether or not parents who could afford to educate their children should be allowed to send them to government-funded schools, and had just established, as a separate institution, the government-funded Advanced School for Girls, Spence's vision depicted an organisation of learning which sought to eliminate intractable hierarchies of class, gender and authority from education.

The populism flourishing in South Australia in the early 1890s when Catherine Spence first took to the colony's platforms was but a brief and distant echo of the populism that she encountered in the United States in 1893. In this period there were close and extensive links between populism and the multifarious activities and organisations of the Women's Movement that mushroomed throughout the capitalist industrial, and industrialising, world in the late 19th century. Spence encountered a number of prominent representatives of the North American Women's Movement during that year.

In San Francisco she met ‘that celebrated journalist, poetess and economic writer, Charlotte Perkins Stetson’. In 1893, the feminist thinker we now know as Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not so much celebrated as struggling against unwanted notoriety, because she had left her husband. Jeanne Young, writing the last section of Spence's autobiography for her, accorded to Gilman a recognition which she acquired somewhat later, but Gilman was already active in feminist circles. To her, Spence owed ‘one of the best women's meetings I ever addressed’. In Chicago, Spence was in the heartland of the North American women's labour movement. In 1893, a time of severe economic depression in Chicago and elsewhere, members of the Working Women's Union, the Ladies’ Federal Union and the Illinois Women's Alliance all helped in organising and supporting a strike of 3,000 garment workers. Much of that activity emanated from Hull House which Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had founded in 1889 on the model of Toynbee Hall in the east end of London.