Where has feminism been, and where is it going? Over the past few years a debate has been raging among feminists, one that seems to have led to a revision of the feminist project. Once seen as a network of activists, feminism is in crisis, with one section - postfeminism - going so far as to argue that women are no longer oppressed.

The postfeminists' arguments merge with those of rightwing anti-feminists, both blaming the women's movement for the remaining inequality between men and women. Women would not be unequal if they adopted a new confident attitude and rejected many of the complaints of current feminism, the argument goes.

It's a long way from the first days of the Women's Liberation Movement, which was influenced by revolutionary socialists and radical feminists, both arguing for social change and collective action. While middle class reformism or liberal feminism has always been a strong influence, it appears nowadays to be the main voice, if the recent literature is any guide.

I want to look back at three Australian books. Virginia Trioli's Generation f and Kathy Bail's collection of articles in DIY FEMINISM are written by younger women, defending the individual activity of a range of Australian feminists. The third book - The Meagre Harvest - is a study of the Australian women's movement by a longterm feminist, Gisela Kaplan.

But first some background. The open debate began in Australia in 1995 around Helen Garner's The First Stone. This book was written about the incidents at the University of Melbourne, when two female students accused the Master of Ormond College of sexual harassment. Eventually the women went to the police, who charged the Master. He was acquitted, on appeal, but resigned from Ormond. Garner supported the Master, asking whether this was 'what feminism had mutated into - these cold-faced, punitive girls'.

Completely ignoring the class differences between a college master and student, and saying they held equal power, she put the onus on young women to use their personal feminine skills to avoid unpleasantness. For Garner, the Ormond College events were not sexual harassment, rather sexual attention, which if unwanted could have been resolved without recourse to the law.

In a speech to the rightwing Sydney Institute, Garner took the issue further, implying women are often to blame for sexual harassment by 'pretending that it means nothing at all to wear, say, a low-necked dress in a bar at 2am'.

Following in the footsteps of American writer Naomi Wolf, who argued in Fire With Fire in 1994 that women were no longer oppressed and feminism needed to junk 'victim feminism', Garner's targets were those so-called 'victim feminists', the radical feminists who dominated feminism in the 1980s and who campaigned to increase penalties for violence against women.

The debate that followed took place in the mainstream media, and saw famous Australian feminists line up on both sides. Missing were representative voices from the younger generation, yet the debate was portrayed as punitive anti-male young women against wiser, older feminists. In March 1995 Anne Summers, writing in the Good Weekend magazine, challenged so-called 'third wave' feminists to give a perspective of 'how life seems through twentysomething eyes'.

In 1996 Virginia Trioli, a journalist at the Age, responded to Garner, defending the students. Her book, Generation f, is mostly devoted to defending the new generation of feminists, and in so doing, she reveals a very conservative middle class feminism. She argues that, while today's feminists are not on the streets as much in rallies and demonstrations, they are 'ambitious and politically sophisticated young women working in the law, health, education, finance, the arts, the private sector and trade unions ... applying the principles of their feminisms'.

About the same time, DIY FEMINISM appears, edited by Rolling Stone's Australian editor, Kathy Bail. While this is a broad collection of articles, Bail argues: 'Now feminism is largely about individual practice and taking on personal challenges rather than group identification.'

The debate in Australia remains confused about how much to adopt postfeminist arguments. Some contributors in DIY FEMINISM rail against Wolf and Garner. Kathy Kenny recognises: 'The achievements of some women can obscure the costs borne by women in general,' and that Wolf and Garner's feminism is an attack on women and feminism. She argues that the perceived popularity of this new feminism was really the mainstream media promoting the debates: 'Denouncing feminism has been granted new life by being carried out by those who claim to be feminists themselves.'

Despite their differences over how to deal with sexual harassment, all these writings promote feminism as a struggle by women against men - a project for individuals, not collectives. However, the debate is not just over strategy, but also the nature of the battle-liberal feminists in the US are making a clear argument that women are no longer oppressed. There are strong indications that some Australian liberal feminists may head this way.

Kathy Bail makes clearer, more overt, arguments than most, pointing out that young middle class women today do not need feminism. 'Somehow I just took the notion of equal opportunity in my stride in my teens and never thought I would be in any way disadvantaged as a woman.'

The genderquake myth
It is not the first time prominent feminists have hit out at the feminist movement. In her 1991 publication, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, American feminist Susan Faludi reported that feminists Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Susan Brownmiller all publicly blamed feminism for many of the problems of women.

Naomi Wolf's attack has been more successful because she does not just criticise but provides an alternative - Power Feminism. Fire With Fire presents a vision of a new era for women after the 'genderquake' of the early '90s. That was when Bill Clinton got elected, partly on the women is vote, in 1992 and Anita Hill, who accused Clarence Thomas, nominee for the Supreme Court, of sexual harassment, was able to force US society to take her claims seriously. Wolf argues that Paul Keating's unexpected election win in 1993 was the result of a high pro-ALP vote among women.

Wolf is right to see a line has been crossed ... for her class. While most working class women have not even achieved equal pay, middle class women are more likely to be becoming bosses and politicians, often on equal pay and conditions. Since the 1970s in Australia and elsewhere there have been important improvements for professional and middle class women. The Australian Women's Year Book, released in May 1997, reported that:

* More women (344,200) than men (289,900) were studying at a higher education institution in 1996.

* An equal proportion of men and women hold a degree or higher qualification.

* The number of women setting up their own business is growing by 3 per cent per year, more than 1.5 times the rate for men.

* Women are now 19 per cent of senior executives in the Commonwealth Public Service, compared with 6 per cent in 1986.

Such results are prevalent across the western world, providing the material basis for the new feminist ideas. For Wolf, the 'genderquake' showed that, with new attitudes and confidence, women, all women, can easily complete the victory of full equality. This is why, for Wolf, 'victim feminism' is counter-productive - women are not oppressed anymore, no longer victims, no longer powerless. Instead of emphasising powerlessness, women should recognise their power and use it in battle with men.

Now, there was always a problem with feminism emphasising women as victims, because women have never just been victims, but also fighters. However, Wolf is saying that women and men are virtually on a level playing field and if women don't succeed, it's their own fault. But is it really the case that women are no longer oppressed?

A Meagre Harvest
The third book I want to look at is helpful in answering this question because it is a serious assessment of the women's movement from 1950-90. The Meagre Harvest, published in 1996 by feminist historian Gisela Kaplan, states: 'The success for some Anglo-Celtic, Australian-born and largely middle-class women has indeed been impressive. But for all the others, it cannot be described as anything but a meagre harvest.'

The results of the women's movement are ambiguous for Kaplan. On the one hand there have been gains: women are no longer expected to be just housewives and mothers, but can and do have careers; women have the right to vote and obtain credit; anti-rape and sexual harassment laws have been strengthened; refuges and other support for single mothers exist; divorce does not carry the old stigma which tied women to unhappy marriages.

But on the other hand: 'The problem is that social and economic policies...[are] often diametrically opposed.' Anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation passed in the 1980s was limited, and '...hardly has one good piece of legislation been put in place before economic `reality' undoes it at the level of practice.' She argues that enterprise bargaining, restructuring and deregulation in the 1980s and '90s has played a major role in undermining women's income and therefore women's equality.

Kaplan cites a series of statistics to show that women's income is still way below men's; some of her sources assess women's average income as low as 45 per cent of men's. Among full-time workers, women still only rate 82 per cent of men's income. While women's participation in the paid workforce is increasing (from 36 per cent of all women in 1966 to 52 per cent in 1992), and women are now 42 per cent of the total workforce, family poverty is increasing.

There are many other indicators that women are oppressed, including the state's concern to control women's bodies. There are still draconian laws against abortion, even in so-called democratic western countries. Despite recent survey results indicating the success of trials for the abortion pill RU486 in Australia, it continues to be banned by the Coalition.

It is clear that despite the gains for women over the past 20 years they are still disadvantaged - and that the basis for women's oppression, which lies in the organisation of family life, has not been fundamentally challenged, especially for working class women who remain the majority.

The capitalist family provides the material basis for the oppression of women. Because the majority of women continue to perform unpaid labour in the home for little recognition, all women are expected to accept unequal status. Naomi Wolf and the postfeminists have not shown that this situation has been challenged, let alone eliminated. They have proven only that middle class women have made gains.

The feminist dilemma
The crisis in feminism is a direct result of the weakness of the feminist strategy. Kaplan's assessment of the Australian women's movement's strategy is ambivalent: on the one hand, she recognises the success of the 'femocracy' 'secondwave feminists: have forged an organisational network which has managed to infiltrate government and national institutions and in doing so achieve attitudinal changes of some magnitude.' However, the women's movement 'has not managed to infiltrate areas of hard-core decision making such as taxation and economic planning.'

One of the major weaknesses of the movement was and remains internal division. Kaplan is especially critical of the class and cultural biases of the mainstream movement: she maintains that both Aboriginal and migrant women were excluded except as 'tokens'. And she is especially critical of the 'feminist academic ivory-tower league...increasingly...linked neither to social change nor to progressive social responsibility...[and] mainly white, middle-class, part of the dominant culture and educated at the best schools.'

Postmodernism comes in for strident criticism because 'it turns its back on the very question that started the movement: that of equality'. '[T]the logical conclusion of [postmodernism's] withdrawal from any binding ethical framework...is that Hitler's Mein Kampf becomes no more or less valid or interesting as a text than the Kama Sutra, Marx's Capital or the Bible. Such relativism...moves against social justice, equality, the rights of minorities, participatory democracy and the like.'

Sisterhood - an alliance of women across classes - has not worked to benefit working class women, and won't be any use in fighting back against the Right. That's the key lesson from Gisela Kaplan's book. '[O]ne may speculate that the women's movement in Australia has been...a protest by the upper (well-educated) echelon of middle-class women. Enlisting working class women in their struggle lent weight to the cause, but did it benefit working class women? I see no evidence of this.' Unfortunately, she offers no real alternative to this alliance.

It was the early years of the second-wave movement that most benefited working class women. According to Kaplan: 'The underlying vitality of the women's movement in Australia was maintained by radical demands for a redistribution of wealth.' The struggle for equal pay, childcare and abortion rights was fought as part of the wider working class movement. In fact, men and women unionists united to fight for equal pay before the women's movement began.

As this wider struggle declined, the women's movement turned towards separatism and a radical feminism which was based on the theory of patriarchy. As Kaplan points out, while all women gained something with the improvements to women's status, the 1980s were years of erosion of working class living standards.

The femocrats working for the 1980s Labor government seemed to have missed the economic attacks being carried out on women workers by that same bureaucracy. Speaking about the shift to economic rationalism, she comments: 'some feminists may well be unaware how much they themselves have become part of this thinking.'

Especially for liberal feminism, women's oppression is reduced to inequality within their own class, and women's liberation reduced to winning that equality under capitalism. Little wonder that the middle class postfeminists can now assert their politics. For many of these women, they seem to be on the way to full equality.

A fundamental change in society is necessary to remove the cause of women's oppression and to allow a new organisation of the family that is not based on the unpaid labour of women. However, such a change will not succeed without the greatest unity between men and women workers. Socialists argue that we need to begin the fightback today - in the everyday struggles of workers for better conditions at work and in society. Victorian nurses recently won 224 new jobs, paid maternity leave, an 11 per cent pay rise and minimum shift length - all without trade-offs. To do so required industrial action and unity among women and men from many different backgrounds. Women are now a permanent part of the workforce like never before. As such we are unionists and pickets - a power to be reckoned with.

Sex games
Fire With Fire marked a shift to the right in 1994 for Naomi Wolf, who had established her feminist credentials with The Beauty Myth in 1990. The shift has become a slide with her new position in opposition to abortion and her call to combine with rightwing anti-abortionists to find a way to reduce the number of abortions.

Some postfeminists go even further: Katie Roiphe's, The Morning After, for example, argues that date rape is a figment of feminists' imagination: 'There is a grey area in which someone's rape may be another person's bad night.' Many of us thought we had had these debates out in the '70s and early '80s when, after much campaigning, judges and police and the media were forced to take women's claims more seriously. It's only a few years since most women's marches were dominated by the slogan: 'However we dress, wherever we go, yes means yes, no means no.'

Now liberal feminists are promoting sex as the main arena for the sex battle. No longer do they want sex to be associated with negative problems like rape and sexual harassment. Rather, as Wolf's latest book, Promiscuities, argues, women must use their female sexuality confidently, promoting the 'inner slut' in women - the key tactic for the modern battle between the sexes. Here, Power Feminism meshes with the most rightwing of the postfeminists - women can find liberation through sexuality. Any woman can do it. In the words of the Spice Girls, that's 'Girlpower'. Susan Estrich, top expert on rape law and first woman president of the Harvard Law Review, illustrates the new feminist tactics with her new screenplay. It's about a prostitute who teaches her girlfriends erotic techniques to lure men and hang on to them. New York Times writer Maureen Dowd reported in the London Guardian (July 8, 1997) that Estrich stated she wanted to explore the issues of feminism through the 'classic male form' of the hooker, 'not the hooker as victim, but the hooker as a person who is possessed of great power and knows how to use it'.

This is a tremendous shift from the positive aggression of the early women's movement and images of burning bras (symbolic of removing the restrictions on women's lives, rather than to be taken all that literally). Now liberation for women is equated with sexual liberty, but a sexual liberty treats men as women have been treated, making them into sex objects. The strategy is based on the notion that women have power as individuals equal to men, regardless of their class position, but they can only exercise that power with the appropriate assertive attitude.

Socialists welcome sexual liberation, openly discussing sexuality, as a step forward. It makes it more difficult for the Church to keep the wraps on sex and human relationships. We want a more open society in general. However, objectifying human bodies, male or female, reflects the lack of sexual freedom. Sexual freedom is not possible without real freedom based on real control over our lives.

Power is not inherent in sexual prowess, rather it lies in our ability to own or control wealth. Middle class women begin to feel powerful as individuals as they gain positions in society - they can realistically become politicians and company directors, and wield real power even as individuals. These women may be able to create the illusion of sexual equality, but it is totally unrealistic to assume that working class women or men have individual power. Even if tiny numbers of middle class women can play these sex games, it merely reinforces the old gender stereotypes which the women's movement used to be united in rejecting. It is equally ridiculous for Helen Garner to expect that the two students use the same power in sexual encounters as the Master of Ormond College. Individual working women (and men) and students have power only when they unite in collective action.

Further, under capitalism, competing sexually demands the right stereotypical appearance, and you need money for that. Even if you're good at it, how does a better sex life translate into better jobs and higher living standards? Changing your lifestyle may be a realistic strategy for the middle class but it can't win equality and liberation for workers. Worse, it can divert workers away from the real source of liberation by maintaining artificial divisions between men and women workers.

The individualism of this sexual battle encourages assertiveness but there is a difference between the assertiveness of women which develops out of political awareness and collective struggle - strikes and demonstrations - and the assertiveness of competitive individual women.

However, working class women could never be satisfied with just equality - should any working woman accept the limits of the life and living standards of the working class male? What is so desirable about poorer health, shorter life expectancy, greater pressure to do unwanted overtime, and the constant stress over getting or keeping a job that characterises the lives of so many working class men?

Inequality is just one aspect of the problems for working women: just think about the woman worker, spending perhaps 40 hours on work at home after working 40 hours in the factory or office. Middle class women can afford childcare and cleaners and domestic help. While more men are doing housework, it is women who tend to take on this burden whether or not they are also holding down a paid job. This situation cannot be turned around by making an equal number of men do the child-rearing. It is often the case that, because men's wages are higher and they have more access to overtime and even full-time jobs, the couple plan that he works and she stays home. These practices are built into the system. We have the resources to eliminate the drudgery of housework for men or women. But it would mean the state providing for these tasks - and for capitalists this would be an insupportable drain on profits.

At its heart, feminist theory cannot deal with a society divided by class. The notion that all women can unite was always wrong: even though women of the ruling class suffer oppression as women, they also benefit from the divisions and inequalities among working people. In other words, they benefit from women's oppression.

So, in 1993, when Margaret Jackson was the only female board member of BHP, she had to fight to be allowed to wear trousers to work. But she never defended working women suffering under enterprise bargaining. And where was her sisterhood for the working class women of Newcastle?

Conclusion
Socialists reject the underlying assumption of much feminist theories - that male domination is to blame for women's oppression. The highest points of the struggle against oppression have coincided with the high points of class struggle. The best example still remains the Russian revolution, from 1917 to 1924. One of the first steps of the new workers' government was to abolish legal inequality between men and women, including granting equal wages. A serious attempt was made to socialise all elements of childcare and housework, and abortion was legalised. Laws against homosexuality were repealed and marriage was made a voluntary act, with either partner able to dissolve it.

The attack on feminism from the right, as well as much of the new 'individualist' theory, is an attack on its fighting aspects and an attack on the gains of the Women's Liberation Movement. Socialists therefore defend those aspects of feminism which recognise that women are oppressed and that there needs to be a fightback against the whole system.

Judy McVey is a long-term socialist and trade unionist, a member of the International Socialist Organisation. She has been an active supporter of women's liberation since the 1970s. In 2000 she helped found the Refugee Action Collective in Victoria. Contact Judy on jmcv@bigpond.com