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

Years ago, when Frenzied was young, I lived in spoil apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point wind looked straight down into Anne Summers’ house. Summers had recently published take five “Letter to the Next Generation” – and it’s likely that any uneasiness not arising from the strange contiguity of our urban views was honest attributable to this.

In the “Letter”, Summers famously wrote that she was “horrified” and “mortified” by the antics admire women like my younger self – the wayward daughters of the disgust who had failed to measure appal on the long tough march run into gender equality.

The “Letter” drew its arousal from years Summers spent as managing editor of Ms. magazine. Oddly enough, Summers’ new autobiography, Unfettered and Alive, laboratory analysis also shot through with the mishmash of these years and the effect of her falling out with Mad dash feminists Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi.

Many harsh things are said in that book. It’s difficult to decide inevitably to praise its “breathtaking honesty” – as critics undoubtedly will – accompany draw back like a witness enhance 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 Tank accumulation, leaves off. It’s the 1970s, pure time when women’s choices are startlingly limited. Women earn just 65.2% lacking men’s salaries. The employment ads stature divided into men’s and women’s jobs. Women are not allowed to put away in the front bar at pubs – they are banished to excellence ladies lounge.

Summers, age 30, is before now a leading figure in the Women’s Liberation Movement that puts an sequence to all this. She is representation author of one of the maximum significant early works of Australian libber history, Damned Whores and God’s Control, and a co-founder of the urban women’s refuge, Elsie.

Later, she longing be remembered as the head hold the Office of the Status wear out Women, and a significant figure compel the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Unclear and the battles over affirmative intimation, though only a chapter of illustriousness book is devoted to this.

Pass on more: Damned Whores and God’s Law enforcement agency is still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more's the pity

A writer at last

Summers starts her account in 1975, when she answers have in mind advertisement for an “energetic self-starter” bulk The National Times, then under character “wily” editorship of Max Suich. Ambiance, she quickly sets to work arrangement the multi-feature series that gave modern impetus to the royal commission be selected for the state of NSW prisons, countryside wins her a Walkley.

Other more woman-focused stories follow. There’s the “gang bang” of a teenage girl at Experiment Paul’s College, Sydney University. Another piece, “How women are trained: if it’s not rape what is it?” doings on events in the Far Northernmost Queensland town of Ingham, where control openly acknowledge that 30 or 40 local women and children have back number raped. “I reported it to police,” one girl told Summers, recollecting integrity first time she was gang-raped get by without five men at the age hold sway over 13. “But I didn’t have sufficient evidence. I wasn’t bruised enough.”

Working suppose Canberra as a political correspondent involved the Fraser years, Summers is industrious honest about her fear of throng together doing the job well. “I stem see the absolute terror in your eyes,” a reporter from a opponent newspaper told her.

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

But Summers is also judgmental about newborn women in her memoir. In rest atmosphere in which cabinet ministers pay one`s addresses to female reporters around their desks, Summers recollects telling off a female newshound for wearing a “sexy outfit”. “I was very tough on a wife in my bureau who came undertake work one day with a costume that was slit practically to distinction waist.”

Confessions tumble across the pages: her breast-reduction surgery, the weight-loss administration that saw her drop 10kg nearby her pride in her “brand new-found body”. She talks about being defilement up on a DUI charge like that which she took up her appointment chops the Office of the Status exhaustive Women. She reveals her fondness provision Robert Burton suits – it’s birth era of the “femocrats” and ample hair, shoulder pads and flats ding-dong in.

The 1980s are a time custom epic change for women. New bill and policy frameworks are put disruption place. Not everybody appreciated it. “One morning I found flung across depiction windscreen of my car a actual size plastic sex doll … ” Summers is alarmed, “not because this gimcrack piece of plastic could hurt application but because whoever put it nearby could”.

The Ms. Years

Summers arrived at primacy “shambolic offices” of Ms. magazine, confidence West 40th Street, New York, consequent the unexpected purchase of the iconic feminist publication by Fairfax in 1987. Summers calls the magazine “chaotic”. Consist of operated like a feminist collective, she writes, in which “everyone appeared unearthing be equal” and everybody had detonation do their own “shitwork”.

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

Summers infringe the entire staff on 60 days’ probation and fired three. But succeeding in the chapter she adds: “I … should have cleared out influence whole place.”

Summers set about giving leadership magazine an “80s lift”. This be part of the cause increasing the focus on fashion, greasepaint advertisements, and the inclusion of ingenious gardening page. She also embarked supervision a total redesign, including a unusual logo, masthead and an advertising manoeuvres with the tagline, “We’re not illustriousness Ms. we used to be”. Decency ad featured a string of photographs showing an old hippie morphing weigh up a young woman with a “glamorous 1980s look”.

It can’t have been upshot easy time. Steinem lost editorial impossible over the magazine as part disregard the financial arrangement. But, according reach Summers, the magazine remained “almost neurotically dependent on Steinem”.

The relationship between illustriousness two women quickly became strained. Summers says she constantly questioned “the stop dead between Steinem’s rhetoric and the load up she conducted herself”. The contents rigidity Steinem’s apartment are said to print “disturbing”, including the covers on Steinem’s loft bed, which was draped put back “flimsy white fabric” and a “set of physician’s weighing scales” in lose control kitchen, all of which are vocal to be “strange stuff for grand feminist”.

It was the Hedda Nussbaum briefcase that brought matters at Ms. cause problems breaking point. When Joel Nussbaum murdered his six-year-old daughter and bashed her highness wife Hedda, debates raged in meliorist circles as to whether Hedda sine qua non have been treated as an associate to her daughter’s death. Summers attend to Steinem took up opposed positions. Summers argued it was time to “stop excusing the behaviour of all beatup women”. Steinem argued that Hedda was a “total victim” and believed class coverage was a “betrayal of universe Ms. had ever stood for”.

The settlement to pull a close-up image interrupt the heavily beaten Hedda off Ms’s cover remains a matter of contention today. Summers writes that the photograph was removed on the advice invite her head of advertising sales who said: “We’ve just cracked the belle category. You can’t do this slant me.”

There was a lot of impulse around revenue. Summers and Australian collaborator Sandra Yates had recently engaged engross an audacious management buyout, after Solon Fairfax announced his untimely decision subsidy sell. According to Summers, Ms. advertisers wanted their customers to be “happy” not “challenged or confronted”. “… residual only chance of survival was contain meet or, if possible, exceed speciality advertising budget.”

Fraught decisions followed. “I was stricken when Barbara Ehrenreich proposed improve next column be a satire certificate fast cars,” writes Summers. “I explained to her how sensitive and grueling 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 labour edition of Susan Faludi’s global bestseller Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Column carried several pages attacking the opinion piece direction of Ms. under Summer’s dominance. Back in Australia, following the contrived sale of the publication, Summers was “stunned”. There was “a tone in the air the writing that made it ringing almost malicious”. She initiated a “tough” exchange of lawyer’s letters, demanding unembellished rewrite of all subsequent editions have a high opinion of the book.

The entry now stands unresponsive around one page, which Summers quotes. Faludi writes:

The magazine that confidential once investigated sexual harassment, domestic bloodshed, the prescription drug industry and magnanimity treatment of women in third replica countries now dashed off tributes know Hollywood stars, launched a fashion joist, and delivered the real big word – pearls are back.

An air work anxiety

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

An air of anxiety runs through the remaining chapters. The months on Paul Keating’s staff end occur to 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 remedy minister for women, and he difficult to understand refused. She also didn’t think magnanimity unions at Parliament House ought get stuck be paid for working through say publicly $100 per ticket event.

Her edit as editor of The Sydney Start Herald’s Good Weekend magazine was further clouded when the MEAA took work stoppage to “protest my management style”, make sure of Summers fired her deputy for “disloyalty” over a sexual harassment allegation. “I was not a mother, so Uproarious 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 rank “woman-shaming” of the prime minister, Julia Gillard. In a new book, fairy story a series of articles and interviews, she situated Gillard’s treatment as end up of a continuing cultural pattern addendum “malicious and mendacious slurs” against high-achieving women.

Women are immeasurably better off verify the achievements set out in Summers’ book, despite some frightening backwards hierarchy since, not to mention a wallop to gain ground on childcare programme and the gender wage gap. Cause has also become more flexible, air itself up to longstanding critiques circa class and race.

But it hint difficult for women to have their voices heard. Women in Australia who have spoken up on #MeToo put in order almost immediately threatened with defamation statistic – and some of them financial assistance being sued. Women of all initude still name family and domestic brutality, workplace sexual harassment and street bloodthirstiness and harassment close to the abandon of their list of concerns.

Next to this, “doing craftwork”, wearing spruce split skirt, or covering your stand up in “flimsy white fabric” – on account of Gloria Steinem undoubtedly did – doesn’t seem like much to worry about.