AAWAA brings to you ‘Local Action’ – interviews with women getting it done across Australia. In Local Action we talk to Susan Hawthorne. Susan Hawthorne, a legendary Australian feminist, is an award-winning writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Susan Hawthorne, with her partner Renate Klein, founded Spinifex Press, a leading independent radical feminist publisher in Australia.
Susan is the author/editor of 30 books published in seven languages. Her non-fiction books include: Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (2020) In Defence of Separatism (2019), Bibliodiversity (2014), Wild Politics (2002/2022), The Spinifex Quiz Book (1993). Her works also include nine collections of poetry. Her latest book Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence has just been released. (September 2024)
Susan Hawthorne has been active in the women’s liberation movement since 1973, was involved in Melbourne’s Rape Crisis Centre and performed as an aerialist in two women’s circuses. She has taught English to Arabic-speaking women, worked in Aboriginal education and has taught across many subject areas in universities. She was Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at James Cook University, Townsville. She was the winner of the 2017 Penguin Random House Best Achievement in Writing in the Inspire Awards for her work increasing people’s awareness of epilepsy and the politics of disability. She has won awards for her contribution to the gay and lesbian community and to publishing. Susan has been getting it done!
How long have you been a feminist?
My mother was a very strong woman, so she certainly had a big influence on me, but we disagreed with one another politically. However, she read Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics before me and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But we were living in different places at the time so were not talking about these things daily. In 1972, I read Germaine’s book, The Female Eunuch – it didn’t instantly turn me into a feminist but my boyfriend at the time said we should burn that book – so clearly it must have changed something in me! I was studying at Melbourne Teachers College and later I was at La Trobe University. About six months into that I went along to the Woman’s Liberation Group at La Trobe and that very first meeting turned me into a feminist. What happened was they were discussing bringing two feminists to Melbourne able to talk about something. Can’t remember what I said now but it was something like, ”Who are these two chicks anyway?“ With one voice the entire group yelled “WOMAN!” That changed me forever. I never used the word ‘chick’ again unless I was talking about baby birds. I then started doing posters for the event. I must have said we should do posters and then the next person said whoever suggests something should do it. Thankfully another woman in the group said to me you can come over to my place on the weekend and we can do posters. That was my first action as a feminist.
Was that the beginning of your life as a feminist?
Yes! A year or so later I stood for the Student Representative Council along with three other women, and we stood on the ‘Future is Feminist’ ticket and all of us got onto the Student Representative Council. I ran the committee, which was called Woman’s Affairs, and I ended up working for Melbourne’s Rape Crisis Centre.
Over the years I think probably rape is the thing that I’ve been most active in fighting against. When opened in Melbourne, which was in 1974, it was a really big thing for me, and very important in terms of my development as a feminist and somebody who thinks about the issues.
What kinds of actions have you been involved in?
I recall I was in a local action group, and we went out one night to do some graffiti writing, and it was about a cigarette called Bradfield. Bradfield had a tagline ‘not mild’. It was kind of the masculine cigarette. So, what we did was we painted up under ‘not mild,’ ‘But sexist’. And we thought that we would go around to all the billboards in Melbourne and graffiti them. We found one in the northern suburbs – but all the other billboards for Bradfield were already graffitied. So, we were not the only ones out there. It was taken off the market quickly after that.
I went to all the International Women’s Day Marches; I went to all the protests. I was living in the women’s liberation community and the lesbian community. So, 24 hours a day, you know, we were being feminist in one way or another. It was just part of our lives. That’s just how it was.
At university I became very interested in history and I studied Revolutionary History including Mexico, China and Russia, and that gave me an interesting perspective. In my second year, when I was enrolled in African History, I learned about the uprising of the Ibu women in Nigeria. They came out with their puts and pans and protested what was happening. So, discovering that women in many places had been involved with this ongoing struggle for women liberation was fascinating and I studied Women’s History the next year and I learnt about the suffragettes and women’s fight for the vote. In the meantime, I was studying philosophy and trying to put a feminist spin on just about everything I wrote. It didn’t always happen. Some subjects are quite hard to put a feminist spin on. I wrote an honours thesis on ‘In defence of separatism’. Well, that assured that I would not have a career in academia. So basically, I was booted out at the point.
So, you went out to work?
My thesis wasn’t published until 2019 by Spinifex Press. You know, sometimes you need to own the means of production. I’ve been very involved in different kinds of women’s art projects. In 1984, after being unemployed for about 16 months I became eligible for a job and the job was Writing, Music and Theatre director at Women150. Women150 was part of the 150th celebrations for the establishment of state of Victoria in 1985. At this stage of my career I’d already worked in Aboriginal Education. I’ve already worked teaching English as a second language to Arabic speaking women. It was supposed a celebration of the British Invasion of Victoria. I decided I really wanted to undercut that; I took to my Valerie Solanas position of unworking the system. Which was to do things to subvert it. So, in my job, I tried to do that. We had a play written by Eva Johnson called Jinderella, which was a subversive take on the Cinderella story but was also probably one of the earliest artworks about the stolen generation. Eva had been a member of the stolen generation. We also had in the music area a huge event at the Melbourne Town Hall of women’s compositions played by women and conducted by woman and as far as I know that was the first time that it happened. However, these events of the woman’s movement are similar to what happened in the early 20th century, like in 1907, there was a great big Art exhibition of women’s work. I didn’t know about it until I stumbled upon this. So probably there were women’s events in history that were never recorded. I wrote about that in something called the Forgotten Women Writer’s Festivals. The Language of Difference Writers’ Festival that I was organising then finished up going for nine days now only a novice would do 9 days of writing and talking and workshopping. That was in Melbourne in August and September in 1985.
The festival was held at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne in 1985, and it was amazing. We had whole day sessions on class, sexuality, migration and Indigenous writing. That was basically the core of what was going on. Then after that I did a little bit of academic work in different places. I worked at Deakin University for a year teaching in the Koorie Teachers Education Project. I’ve done some work teaching Women’s studies, and I ran my own courses at the Council of Adult Education, which was great as you can invent courses. Nobody told you what you could and could not do. Then I was interviewed for a job at Penguin, it didn’t happen the first time but the second time I got the job! I’ve discovered when I’ve been the writing coordinator that publishers were quite nice people and you know, they didn’t have two heads, and they weren’t as frightening as I thought. That’s how I started working in the publishing industry and that’s been the core of my activism ever since. While I was at Penguin, I also wanted to unwork the system. So, I brought in as many writers as possible who were Aboriginal writers, lesbian writers, migrant writers, working class background – what I was trying to do to bring in work by writers who had not previously been heard in the mainstream. Again, sometimes that worked so sometimes it didn’t. I did that for four years and it was fun.
I love that you unworked the system.
Working at Penguin was good training. There are things that you can do in a big company like Penguin that you can’t do when you’re in that tiny little publisher like Spinifex.
How did you start Spinifex Press?
At the end of 1990, Renate Klein and I went on a holiday to Kakadu, that was when we decided to start our own publishing house. It has been getting hard for radical feminist work to be published. You may have noticed when you go to the book shop the women’s section has disappeared. You may have a gender or there would be a culture studies section or a post-modernist section. At that time Renate had a background in nonfiction, women’s studies and journals and I had Australian nonfiction and poetry and so between this, we had a pretty good spread of experience. We figured we had a good chance of doing it, but we didn’t know when we first set up if we would last for more than 12 months. I really thought this is some experiment and we might publish four books, which is what we did in our first year. But you know now we’ve since gone on and published almost 300 books.
That is a success story!
I’ve also been involved in two women circuses, the women’s circus in Melbourne and all the Performing Older Women’s Circus. When I went along to my first meeting there, I said what I really want to do is aerials and everybody kind of looked at me – “Oh no, it’s too hard.” But, in fact, we found somebody to run a class for us, and there were several of us doing it. That is how I became an aerialist, and I just loved it. It is unlike anything else you must be completely focused, so it’s almost like a meditation in some way. It works a whole lot better for me than meditation itself. I’ve been involved in various other arts activities including visual art, music and theatre and so forth. Then, obviously, writing is my main area of focus.
The other really important area of research that I have been involved in has been on the torture of lesbians. Which I was alerted to when I was in Uganda in 2002. I became aware that lesbians have been tortured and so I started to investigate that and spent, I don’t know, at least 15 years chasing it down. Discovering more and more and the fact that lesbians are being tortured around the world. Amnesty International, for example, never puts out that lesbians are being tortured even though it is one is the few organisations that’s documented something about the atrocities. But always gay men and the trans get the biggest space. Yet in their report on women who were tortured is an appendix, a 3-page appendix, on lesbians so you know it’s kind of a non-subject. I think it is incredibly important that this is investigated because if we don’t know what’s happening to a particular group then that is problematic. Research has been very important in terms of my thinking about bigger issues and again coming back to the issue of rape because corrective rape is a huge issue in several countries, but particularly South Africa, which is a country which is meant to be protecting lesbians, constitutionally.
What is your assessment of how women’s rights have been diminished over the last 5 to 10 years?
There are three things that are important. One is the torture of lesbians. I think the fact that there is very little activism around it is important. Another one is what I would call the perversion of language by United Nations and other leading organisations. I remember reading stuff about language and feminism and a good example was ‘Man rapes woman’ as an example of a very simple English sentence and the writer I think it might have been Robin Lakoff. Subject, verb, object. ‘Man rapes woman’ these days you try to say that sentence and you have to say something like ‘man’ that’s okay because man is not under threat. That word is used accepted in the times of violence by men. ‘G. B. S. V’s,’ gender based sexual violence, and the U. N. started to use that because they were worried some people might get upset because men were left out of the conversation as victims of rape. Woman is replaced with something like ‘front hole havers.’ But yeah, it’s men who are raping women. It’s not women who are raping men.
As for the term ‘front hole havers’, that’s a word that’s come from the transgender industry and it’s clear to me that whoever came up with that never read a biology book! They have never looked at biology, they’ve never even used their eyes because women have three holes! Language has been corrupted. The whole sentence is completely corrupted. It’s an indicator of where our language has gone. I could have chosen ‘menstruator’ or any other name. The word ‘man’ continues to be used occasionally. I see the term ‘cis man’ on a rare occasion, but it’s unusual for that to be used but woman is always erased and cis-woman is often found on government forms. We are prevented from being able to talk about our unique shared experience. The women’s liberation movement was so important because it enabled us to talk about what was happening in our lives and we had consciousness-raising groups. We had no idea what we were doing, we just got together, and we started to talk and after some period of talking together, each of us would come to a realisation that we all go through the same challenges and have the same issues. It’s hard to have a consciousness-raising group these days because everything is interfered with by social media, and you know it’s almost impossible to meet with people in real life. If you do, and let’s say you get together in a meeting, you must be on the lookout to see whether some man is trying to get into the group by pretending that he is a woman.
Of course, if you try to keep him out, then you will be called a transphobe. You’ll be called a TERF; a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I’m quite happily to be called a TERF myself. If you look at what’s happening in the Olympics, this week – two men competing in the women’s boxing who have been tested twice and shown to have male DNA. But they got in because they have a passport that says Female. Which I find extraordinary! You can have anything on your passport these days – two headed bison, koala, whatever they want!
It seems to me that reality is less important than a person’s identity these days. What is your take on how Women Studies has become Gender Studies and that seems to be infiltrated by Queer theory?
The first thing they did was to call it Gender Studies. They wanted to make it comfortable for men to come in. Women’s Studies were far too threatening to men. It is incredible how easily men get threatened. Given they are the ones out there causing the problem. After that it became Queer Studies. Post modernism came in the 1980s, it was a bit on the fringe at first. But it took over academia, starting with philosophy and literature who were the first to take it up. Eventually it made its way into history and other disciplines. Queer theory came in on the back of post modernism. Post modernism is a negative theory, and it is nihilistic and it obscures clear communication. As a postmodernist no one can ever say “women all over the world are facing oppression” – because if you do that you are speaking for other women – even if it is really clear that women are oppressed in many ways in multiple countries worldwide through rape, violence, pornography, surrogacy and prostitution.
Post modernism made it hard to fight against anything because we didn’t have a clear group or enemy to fight against. As a result, the women’s liberation movement got diffused in lots of ways into post modernism, queer theory or cultural studies. Women forgot who they were fighting against. At least with Marxism there was a clear division between the classes and that we can say the working-class experiences poverty in a way that is different to the privileged class. Feminism or the Women’s Liberation movement really lost out against post modernism and queer theory. Queer Theory made it ok to say that you were gay. It didn’t make it ok to say you were a lesbian.
As queer theory became more powerful, we had the campaign for same sex marriage. I didn’t join the women’s movement to fight for marriage. I wanted to get rid of marriage. I thought marriage was a bad patriarchal institution. When same sex marriage came along transgender added themselves to the LGB. The LGB has been around for a long time and have a lot in common as they have same sex attraction. The T is a completely different thing – the T is not a sexual orientation. It’s only added on with the intersex group for validation. They’ve been quite successful at doing this. Initially the Intersex group said no – ‘don’t use us. We don’t want to be used by you in this fight’. Now it’s LGBTIQA+. A book we had published a short while ago counted 72 genders. Who can keep track of this and what in the earth does it mean to have 72 genders!
I think there are two distinct groups in the L. G. B. and there’s the T. Q. I. A.+. They have completely different aspirations and different ideologies. The T is very politically powerful, and it is well funded in the political space, and they get lots and lots of money from corporations. They are funded by the billionaires and if you go to the Australian Workplace Equality Index page, which is the AWEI, they are sponsored by the likes of the Australian Tax Office and huge international corporations such as BlackRock.
So why are they funding it well? Jennifer Bilek has the answer. She says it’s because they want to have a transhumanist future. Now they want to get rid of sex altogether. They want to get rid of women. They want to get rid of biology altogether. In July, Spinifex published Jennifer Bilek’s Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman. She spells it all out and it is a billionaire club basically. In the U. S. they have been very, very active in supporting the Democrats. Obama had a lot of support – he was called the first trans president. Biden has done several things to make this happen and Harris will too although it is not clear yet. In Australia, the government that Julia Gillard headed up was the one that that changed the Sex Discrimination Act to include gender, effectively destroying the definition of woman in Australia. When Jacinta Ardern was Prime Minister, New Zealand made changes. It’s very unfortunate that these women were the leaders, whether they did it intentionally, whether they are part of the trans ideology agenda or just happened to be the leader of the country at the time these changes were made. But I think it’s likely that they did know what they were doing, but not perhaps aware of the consequences.
Yeah, that’s what I’d like to think. I’d like to think that those women didn’t knowingly throw every other woman under the bus. It seems to me it’s really coming from the left and I feel like a lot of women have been pushed into the centre.
Clearly the trans ideology has been actively trying to destroy the women’s liberation movement and radical feminism but it is also politically destroying the ecological and green movements. Trans ideology has destroyed the Greens. The Greens are so captured that they are destroying the environment and painting it in a bad light. But I think a result of these things is that it will make the Greens much, much weaker. There’s a manifesto called eco-modernist manifesto, which was written a few years back and it is just awful – it’s a kind of trans ‘feminist’ manifesto (of which there is one) and the eco-modernist manifesto says things like living in cities is the best thing you can do! It’s kind of weird culmination of postmodern pretending to be eco and pulling the carpet out from genuine ecological activists.
My issue has always been rape. That’s what’s happening now. The rape of life. The rape of lesbians, the rape of women and the rape of the wild.
Do you think the contraceptive pill has made women free or has it led to increase in pornography and prostitution?
The contraceptive pill has a negative effect on women. Rather than freeing women I think the contraceptive pill was weaponised by men – used as an excuse to have sexual intercourse when women may have turned them away. Some women enjoy having sex but honestly unless the relationship is turning into a decent relationship what’s the point of it? I used to think that the contraceptive pill was a good thing, but the language has changed. We even use the word ‘right’ there. The contraceptive pill is considered a ‘right’ now. Historically, before men took over the medical industry, women managed their reproductive system through the use of herbs, through the use of medicinal plants, through the use of different kinds of child spacing, all kinds of methods that were used and they were burnt as witches and so a lot of that knowledge was lost. A lot of knowledge was lost or hidden for a very long time.
The contraceptive pill did allow for a certain kind of freedom, but freedom with consequences. Even sex is now seen as a ‘right’ and if as a lesbian you refuse a trans person who is male and still has his genitals but identifies as a lesbian you are threatened with being called a transphobe. The term ‘cotton ceiling’ is used by trans identified males who want to get into lesbian underwear. Lesbians are still being coerced into having sex with men.
The whole thing is really so very twisted.
Surrogacy is not a ‘right’. The surrogacy industry in Australia is being run by gay men. They have huge conferences and they’re making lots and lots of money out of it. The surrogate mother does not. They’ve got overseas company partners who are working with them. Renate Klein wrote a submission to the NSW government last week which is just so brilliant. She just says “no child wants to be a take away baby”. When a puppy is adopted out, it must be at least 8 weeks old according to the RSPCA and be properly weaned. This doesn’t apply to surrogacy; the woman gives birth, and the baby is immediately handed over to the buyer. Then baby has no connection with its mother. Same with the adoption industry in the 1950s to 80s, women were forced to give up their children because they were unmarried and should we not have learned something from the stolen generations. But surrogacy is different. These babies are made to be sold. It is like slavery.
The movement is so misogynistic. It is so capitalist and so anti ecological. It is so pro globalisation. It is flourishing because it is being promoted by the left. It is also heavily promoted in the mainstream in the ABC, in newspapers like the Guardian. The articles are awful and really, really unbalanced, even though they claim the balance. Spinifex Press struggles getting books reviewed. We’ve had to go underground, as women had to do in the past, we fight in underground organisations that lesbians meet up in because we can’t be upfront about it. We have to do it without being obvious and because if they do it in their public and obvious way we will be attacked, and they will call us transphobes. The Lesbian Action Group cannot use the Victorian Pride Centre, paid for by taxpayers because they are for women only. CoAL, Coalition of Activist Lesbians are not listed as members of the Victorian Pride Centre because they are for women. Even the digital world women have no space – Giggle is taken to court for wanting to have a woman only app. In NZ lesbian groups were not allowed to participate in Pride because they were for women only. They were kicked out of Pride!
But of course, men still have their own spaces.
Spinifex Press has so many wonderful books from amazing Australian women writers. Go to https://www.spinifexpress.com.au
