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Adele Murdolo
Working Women's Health
Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicising Racism within Australian feminism
Written histories of Australian feminism have not hitherto addressed the issue of racism within feminism in a comprehensive or detailed manner. However, a number of texts has mentioned the existence of racism within feminism. Within these texts, an historical time-line of significant events has been posited, within which the Brisbane-based 1984 Women and Labour Conference, which had racism as its theme, is often noted as a 'turning point' in Australian feminist theorisations of racism.
In this paper I wish to challenge this time-line - while the 1984 Women and Labour Conference was clearly significant in its unprecedented generation of accounts of race and ethnic divisions written by anglo-Australian feminists, it did not seem to generate such interest among immigrant and Indigenous feminists.
According to 15 interviews that I conducted in the 1990s with immigrant and Indigenous women who were active in feminist activism since the 1970s, immigrant and Indigenous women tended to experience the Conference in ways that simply reinforced, rather than challenged, previous experiences of racism within feminist activism. The Conference did not seem to represent a theoretical turning point for immigrant and Indigenous women feminists.
Through this challenge to the existing historical record, I wish to raise some methodological and theoretical questions about the writing of histories of Australian feminisms. I discuss the ways in which history's reliance on written documentation as evidence, and the need to fit 'new' evidence into the already-established time-lines of a nationalised history to achieve an ordered historical record of feminist activism, often lead to histories that 'write out' the concerns and experiences of immigrant and Indigenous women feminists.
I explore ways that histories of feminisms may be written to account for the concerns and experiences of immigrant and Indigenous women. These ways include rigorous questioning of the inherent exclusions of nationalism, and how these affect women whose belonging to the nation is extremely tenuous. In addition, the existing historical record could be read more creatively, recognising the existence of an 'absent archive' – an archive that is unwritten, or yet to be written through interview transcripts, and while invisible, central to history.
In addition, I encourage a disruptive, relational and discordant view of history which, as Elsa Barkley Brown has put it, refuses to give in to western history's impulse to establish linear order and symmetry. Rather, histories of feminisms in Australia could be written acknowledging multiple dialogues and conversations which do not always agree with each other – like jazz music: 'multiple rhythms being played simultaneously'.
Bio:
Adele Murdolo is currently the Executive Director of Working Women's Health, an immigrant women's health organisation based in Victoria. The service conducts multilingual health promotion, mainly with immigrant women who are working in both paid and unpaid employment.
Adele is from an Italian migrant background and has participated in activism on immigrant and refugee women's issues for over 12 years, in both academic and community forums. She has completed a PhD on the history of the women's movement and the feminist activism of immigrant and refugee women in Australia. She has published on a wide variety of issues relating to women's health, sexuality and media representations of second-generation immigrant women, and issues for women in immigration detention.
<adele@workingwomenshealth.asn.au>