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A review by rebekahroma
Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism by Aileen Moreton-Robinson
4.0
This book was wonderful. I have made a conscious effort to read more by Indigenous women and this does an excellent job of dissecting Australia’s feminist past and disrupting the notions of first and second wave feminists that women’s sole oppression is on the basis of sex. I came to realise that all of the feminist theory I had read had positioned race as ‘other’ as an interlocking part of feminism but that all women had the same type of oppression and shared the same experiences. Sexual freedom (I.e sexuality, contraception, extra marital sex), wages for work, and escapism from the domestic sphere are all white concerns, and race is just added onto that rather than a completely different way of experiencing the world and being a woman.
I found the first three chapters a little hard to get through but I think that is because the main theses of ‘white is never presented as a race’ and ‘white people writing about indigenous women is not objective data’. Both of which I am very familiar with as they have come into dominant discourse in recent years as opposed to 20 years ago when the book was written - which is wonderful! It’s quite academic so it’s not as accessible as it could be, however, considering Indigenous women have constantly been positioned as less cerebral I didn’t mind and personally I am in a position to read it.
Things I learned:
* Freud used indigenous women as evidence of evolution positioning them between apes and white humans
* the difference between slavery and indentured labour in Australia in the 1950s was that the government not free enterprise, controlled the terms and conditions of the trade.
* Indigenous women were not legally entitled to be paid award wages until the 1960s but this money was handled by the manager of the reserve.
* Radical feminists accept that there are both sex and gender differences between men and women. Adrienne rich has argued that because men fear women’s reproductive capacities they need to control women’s bodies. She asserts that motherhood as an institution underpins social and political systems. For her the normative form of motherhood is white motherhood. She states that motherhood has ‘withheld over one half of the human species from the decisions affecting their lives; it exonerates men from fatherhood in any authentic sense, it creates the dangerous schism between ‘private’ and ‘public’ life, it calcifies human choices and personalities. Motherhood as an institution has made some classes of white women prisoners of their bodies. Radical feminists fail to take into account that for other women, such as Indigenous women in Australia, motherhood meant having their children forcibly removed from their care.
* The work of Radha Kumar on feminism and identity politics in India reveals the degree to which Muslim culture has reinforced men’s power over women by the use and construction of ‘traditions’ that position as subservient and inferior. These ‘traditions’ she argues, are a manifestation of muslim men’s need to assert their cultural dominance after British colonisation, rather than being orthodoxy. Kumar’s work shows indirectly the legacy of white colonialism where whiteness shapes the lives of muslim men. The invention of a tradition that did not exist prior to colonisation is a strategy to reclaim the colonised Muslim male self through the subjugation of muslim women. Whiteness is salient in shaping the lives of people of colour through its ideological presence in former British colonies.
* Indigenous women could not participate in first wave feminism because they were not free. Their legal status as wards of the state empowered white protectors to circumscribe their movements, cultural practices, and behaviour. The removal of Indigenous girls from their families and the subsequent compulsory exploitation of their labour as domestic servants became official policy in SA some 17 years after the first-wave of feminists campaigned for and won the right to vote.
* White anthropologists divided indigenous women’s experiences into a binary of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary.’ Traditional being their perception of indigenous culture pre colonialism and contemporary being their lives on stations and reserves. However they did not acknowledge colonialism’s role in changing their lives or forcefully shaping their family structures.
* For Huggins, talking about rape as everyone’s business breaks indigenous law and the racial damage it does far outweighs the importance of gender.
* As Behrendt argues, white feminism tells Indigenous women “that their position in society is defined by their gender rather than their race, that the push for rights by white women will empower black women, that we are aligned with white women in the battle against oppression and that white women are as oppressed as we are.”
* The white feminist anthropologist authorised herself to speak on behalf of Indigenous women and this authority was contested by the self-presentation of Indigenous women. Bell and the white editors’ response to the Indigenous women was to represent them as inadequate academics and unauthentic Indigenous women, mediated through the dialectical triangulation of the middle class subject position white woman, feminist academic and traditional Indigenous woman. They drew on the authority of white masculine modern foundationalist science and its discourse on radicalising “Other”, as a way of reinscribing the dominance of their subject position middle-class white woman in the debate.
* feminist academics’ interaction with difference is a matter of choice not imperative: They live in a country where cities have been developed around invisible conveniences that give social preferences to whiteness in the location of municipal and other services. The design of suburbs and the naming of streets have been planned to serve white neighbourhoods and preserve their whiteness… The engagement with the “Other” remains predominantly, for these women, a dimension of their work practice - their public world - where their academic knowledges engage with difference to varying degree. This reduces the opportunity for their experiential knowledges about the “Other” to be interrogated.
* we must participate in a society not of our making under conditions not of our choosing. Feminists exercise their white race privilege in the women’s movement because issues of importance to Indigenous women such as the preservation of culture are not part of the political agenda for white women.
* When white women were demanding abortions, indigenous women were fighting for stricter controls over contraception, having been coerced into receiving Depo shots (illegal in Australia at the time) by the state
* To change the power relations between these two groups of women is more complex than giving voice, making space or being inclusive within a white feminist politics of difference. The dominance of the subject position middle-class white woman diminishes the inclusiveness of a politics of difference in Australian feminism because it leaves whiteness uninterrogated, centred and invisible.
I found the first three chapters a little hard to get through but I think that is because the main theses of ‘white is never presented as a race’ and ‘white people writing about indigenous women is not objective data’. Both of which I am very familiar with as they have come into dominant discourse in recent years as opposed to 20 years ago when the book was written - which is wonderful! It’s quite academic so it’s not as accessible as it could be, however, considering Indigenous women have constantly been positioned as less cerebral I didn’t mind and personally I am in a position to read it.
Things I learned:
* Freud used indigenous women as evidence of evolution positioning them between apes and white humans
* the difference between slavery and indentured labour in Australia in the 1950s was that the government not free enterprise, controlled the terms and conditions of the trade.
* Indigenous women were not legally entitled to be paid award wages until the 1960s but this money was handled by the manager of the reserve.
* Radical feminists accept that there are both sex and gender differences between men and women. Adrienne rich has argued that because men fear women’s reproductive capacities they need to control women’s bodies. She asserts that motherhood as an institution underpins social and political systems. For her the normative form of motherhood is white motherhood. She states that motherhood has ‘withheld over one half of the human species from the decisions affecting their lives; it exonerates men from fatherhood in any authentic sense, it creates the dangerous schism between ‘private’ and ‘public’ life, it calcifies human choices and personalities. Motherhood as an institution has made some classes of white women prisoners of their bodies. Radical feminists fail to take into account that for other women, such as Indigenous women in Australia, motherhood meant having their children forcibly removed from their care.
* The work of Radha Kumar on feminism and identity politics in India reveals the degree to which Muslim culture has reinforced men’s power over women by the use and construction of ‘traditions’ that position as subservient and inferior. These ‘traditions’ she argues, are a manifestation of muslim men’s need to assert their cultural dominance after British colonisation, rather than being orthodoxy. Kumar’s work shows indirectly the legacy of white colonialism where whiteness shapes the lives of muslim men. The invention of a tradition that did not exist prior to colonisation is a strategy to reclaim the colonised Muslim male self through the subjugation of muslim women. Whiteness is salient in shaping the lives of people of colour through its ideological presence in former British colonies.
* Indigenous women could not participate in first wave feminism because they were not free. Their legal status as wards of the state empowered white protectors to circumscribe their movements, cultural practices, and behaviour. The removal of Indigenous girls from their families and the subsequent compulsory exploitation of their labour as domestic servants became official policy in SA some 17 years after the first-wave of feminists campaigned for and won the right to vote.
* White anthropologists divided indigenous women’s experiences into a binary of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary.’ Traditional being their perception of indigenous culture pre colonialism and contemporary being their lives on stations and reserves. However they did not acknowledge colonialism’s role in changing their lives or forcefully shaping their family structures.
* For Huggins, talking about rape as everyone’s business breaks indigenous law and the racial damage it does far outweighs the importance of gender.
* As Behrendt argues, white feminism tells Indigenous women “that their position in society is defined by their gender rather than their race, that the push for rights by white women will empower black women, that we are aligned with white women in the battle against oppression and that white women are as oppressed as we are.”
* The white feminist anthropologist authorised herself to speak on behalf of Indigenous women and this authority was contested by the self-presentation of Indigenous women. Bell and the white editors’ response to the Indigenous women was to represent them as inadequate academics and unauthentic Indigenous women, mediated through the dialectical triangulation of the middle class subject position white woman, feminist academic and traditional Indigenous woman. They drew on the authority of white masculine modern foundationalist science and its discourse on radicalising “Other”, as a way of reinscribing the dominance of their subject position middle-class white woman in the debate.
* feminist academics’ interaction with difference is a matter of choice not imperative: They live in a country where cities have been developed around invisible conveniences that give social preferences to whiteness in the location of municipal and other services. The design of suburbs and the naming of streets have been planned to serve white neighbourhoods and preserve their whiteness… The engagement with the “Other” remains predominantly, for these women, a dimension of their work practice - their public world - where their academic knowledges engage with difference to varying degree. This reduces the opportunity for their experiential knowledges about the “Other” to be interrogated.
* we must participate in a society not of our making under conditions not of our choosing. Feminists exercise their white race privilege in the women’s movement because issues of importance to Indigenous women such as the preservation of culture are not part of the political agenda for white women.
* When white women were demanding abortions, indigenous women were fighting for stricter controls over contraception, having been coerced into receiving Depo shots (illegal in Australia at the time) by the state
* To change the power relations between these two groups of women is more complex than giving voice, making space or being inclusive within a white feminist politics of difference. The dominance of the subject position middle-class white woman diminishes the inclusiveness of a politics of difference in Australian feminism because it leaves whiteness uninterrogated, centred and invisible.