AAWAA brings to you ‘Local Action’ – interviews with women getting it done across Australia. In Local Action we talk to Betty McLellan. Betty is a feminist ethicist and psychotherapist and is the author of bestselling feminist self-help book Help! I’m Living with a Man Boy, which has been translated into 16 languages. She is also the author of Overcoming Anxiety, Beyond Psychoppression, Ann Hannah: My (Un)Remarkable Grandmother, Unspeakable: A feminist ethic of speech, and just recently Betty released her latest book Truth Abandoned: How can Democracy Survive? Betty has been getting it done!
When did you first realise you were a feminist?
I didn’t think about feminism when I was young. Even in the 1960’s when I was in my 20s, I never actually thought about being a feminist. I used to be a Deaconess in the Methodist Church, now called the Uniting Church. I worked as a deaconess for about 8 years. I always had the feeling that the church was a man’s church. The privilege of man was obvious to me, and I couldn’t have done any feminist analysis because I didn’t know or understand feminism at that time. However, in 1970, I decided to go to the United States and do further study and it was there that I was introduced to feminism. The United States at that time was a hotbed of feminist activity. Very exciting to be there when the Women’s Liberation Movement was getting going. The United States was the place to be and that’s when I started hearing the word feminist. I even took a couple of courses for my master’s degree that focused on feminism. One of my courses, I remember, was called Woman in the Family of Man. So, slowly I understood that I was a feminist, and of course, became quite a radical activist for the feminist cause, and have been ever since.
It’s amazing that you had an internal sense of what was unjust in the church for you before
you were exposed to women’s liberation.
I had two sisters, one older and one younger, and I was very aware that the normal course for me would be to get married and have children as my sisters had done but that wasn’t for me. It’s like it seemed to me that there was more to life than that for women. All of that was going around in my mind, and then I was introduced to feminism. I thought: This is it! And I haven’t looked back!
You have written so many books. Have you always been a writer?
My first book was published in 1992, when I was around about 50 years old. All those years prior to that, I hadn’t thought about writing. What spurred me on to write my first book was that, as a psychotherapist, I was getting quite a number of women clients who had a particular anxiety problem. Not just you know ‘I’m anxious about this I’m anxious about that’ but like real panic attacks, anxiety that couldn’t be explained. I thought – I have a few ideas about this. I wonder if I should try to write a book about this anxiety condition. Around that time, I attended a feminist focused Summer School at Deakin University in Geelong led by Renate Klein and Robyn Rowland. The course that I took was run by Dale Spender and I spoke to Dale during one of the breaks, and I said, ‘I’d really like to write a book, you know, but I’ve never written anything’. She said, ‘why not? Just go ahead and start writing!’ She encouraged me and she said, ‘if you have something to say write it down and you’ll see that you can write.’ So I did!
It took a while writing my first book which is called Overcoming Anxiety. After the first book, you know, you get the bug! I thought: I really need to write a book about feminist therapy. So, my second book was Beyond Psychoppression in which I talk about the oppression that can happen in therapy. In our training, we’re taught to focus on the client herself/himself. If you’re suffering from depression, the reason must be within yourself. It must be your fault. You must be doing something wrong and the therapist’s role is to help you sort your stuff out. But if you read books like Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, it changes your whole perspective. When a woman is experiencing depression, it might be something wrong within her, or it could be because she is a woman and is being oppressed, say for example, by her husband. It’s not as simple as saying the problem lies within the individual. You can’t just explain a psychological problem by looking within the person. You must get the person to look outward. Tell me what’s happening in your life and tell me about your relationships. Then you find that things start to reveal themselves.
What you are saying is so relevant. Young women have so much anxiety and they’re living in this world where women are objectified constantly online, and they can’t escape pornography. Children are seeing pornography at 8 on mobile devices. What are we doing to young women? They’re objectifying themselves, or they are opting out and thinking they can change sex.
Yes exactly. It is crazy. The young women who have chosen to continue with their study and go on to university are opened to other ideas, but the majority of young girls, teenagers, women, who don’t have that opportunity, or don’t know how to get access to reliable information, are stuck with the internet and social media. They learn on social media and are given a vision of femininity on social media that they feel they have to live up to. All we can do as feminists is just not be too depressed by that (even though we are depressed by it), and just realise how important it is that we get our message straight. It’s hard with young people. You can’t just tell them what to do. You must get your message right. Most importantly we mustn’t give up because if we do there’ll be no one there to hold the line. It will just get worse and worse. And, while we are depressing ourselves here, we may as well go a little further and remind ourselves that the next hurdle for us to navigate is Artificial Intelligence.
Tell me about your third book?
My third book is the one that has been most popular. It’s called Help! I’m living with a Man Boy. It is a self-help book for women, giving practical advice on how to navigate their relationships with men. I’m really pleased that I wrote it. Interestingly, I’ve had men say to me “Why don’t you write one for men? Why don’t you write a book called Help I’m living with a Woman Girl?” Of course, that’s not my job. Without a doubt, there are problems for men living with some women, but it is not a feminist’s job to write that book. It’s a book that should be written by a man.
I received a lot of interesting reactions to that book when it first came out. It’s good title don’t you think?
It is a very good title! My husband and I have been together for 10 years but only married for one year. I don’t believe in marriage. I didn’t want to get married because I didn’t want to be owned by anyone. But then my son said I want us to all have the same last name, so I said – Lets do it. But that book is about him, but I’ve trained my husband and he’s very good now.
Yes, of course, you try to make it work if you want to stay with them. If it doesn’t work, you leave. Someone said to me recently – a young woman – she said to me; ‘how come you are a feminist when you had such a good father and a lovely brother?’ I said ‘it’s not about that! Yes, I was fortunate with my choice of father and brother, as with my mother, but it’s not about that.’ Some women don’t understand that do they? Being a feminist is about the fight for the rights of women and women’s freedom. It doesn’t mean that every man in our lives is a bad man. Like you obviously felt that your husband was worth training. Do that! That’s excellent! Especially since you have a son. Now your husband will give your son a better example of a good man!
Many people may think feminism is a bad thing, or it’s man-hating when really feminists have a higher expectation of men and what they should be and what they can be.
Exactly! That’s a very good point. We don’t put men down. We try to say to them, “come on, step up”, because we believe they can do it. However when men are violent, women often judge the situation, and then decide not to step over the line, to avoid conflict. I think so many women do that, and they wouldn’t dare speak out. It is very sad really. Women are often expected to stay quiet and be submissive and that’s because it really is true that so many men behave like boys, they expect women to pander to them, pander to their ego.
My 4th book was one that I couldn’t get anyone to publish. So, I published it myself. I think it’s probably one of my better books. It’s called Unspeakable: A feminist ethic of speech and it’s about free speech. It’s about who gets most free speech and my point in that book is that for free speech to thrive, it must be fair. That’s the whole point of the book, really. Spinifex Press were unable to publish it at that time but have since published it as an eBook.
My 5th book is Ann Hannah: My (Un)Remarkable Grandmother. It’s a psychological biography. My grandmother was just an ordinary woman. She was quiet and lived with our family since before I was born. By society’s standards, she was unremarkable but, actually, she was remarkable. I wrote the book as a feminist analysis. She didn’t want to leave England and come to Australia back in 1920, but her husband made her and the four children come. He decided, and she had no say in it. Also, her husband, my grandfather sexually abused one of her children for 10 years, and there was nothing she could do about it, because the law in those days did not want to get involved in family issues. A man could do whatever he liked in his home. The daughter he abused was his stepdaughter from Nana’s first marriage. Her first husband died of a lung condition soon after the baby was born. So, there was Nana with a little baby. She met this man, married and had three more children (one being my mother). He thought it was his right to abuse his stepdaughter. Nana never talked about it. She was stoic. But we found out by overhearing conversations between our mother and aunties. Slowly we learned the truth. So, that was one of the important issues I analysed in my book.
My latest book Truth Abandoned: How can Democracy Survive?… a Feminist Response, will be launched on 23 October 2024. The main point of the book is: If we don’t have truth, we won’t have democracy. And that’s incredibly worrying. One example of truth being ignored that I focus on is that relating to the transgender lobby. Here we see governments being prepared to change legal documents to allow the change of sex on birth certificates. How dishonest and absurd is that? Also, we see Governments colluding with trans ideologues to prevent dissent, to prevent women from speaking. A central tenet of democracy is free speech, but not if you are speaking against trans takeover of women’s spaces. Patriarchy tried throughout history to keep women down but we kept fighting back and demanding our rights. Then they came up with the ‘brilliant’ idea of men becoming “women” and silencing biological women.
About 10 or 15 years ago, I was demonised by the men’s rights movement here in Townsville. I was an Adjunct Associate Professor at James Cook University and, without my knowing, they tried to get me sacked from that position. There was a big enquiry going on about me, accusing me of hating men. They asked ‘how could she be teaching male students when she hates men so much?’ Eventually, someone informed me about the inquiry after the investigation was finished and I was found to have done nothing wrong. In the same way, many women and men today are being attacked by trans rights extremists. Another time a group of us were attacked was over prostitution. There was a book launch here in Townsville and I was one of the speakers. A group of loud pro-prostitution people decided to attend and yell over everything any of us said. It was like bedlam – crazy stuff. That’s the kind of thing that’s happening now to women and men who stand up against trans ideology.
So, what the trans extremists are doing is not a new thing?
Anything to do with radical feminist issues like surrogacy, prostitution and pornography, they will not let us speak so we need to find other ways to be together and express our truths. Sadly, when we do get together to discuss an issue of importance to us, we have to do it in secret so as to avoid having our event turned into a circus by those who refuse to let us speak.
Prostitution is called sex work, and it is almost seen as a career choice for many young women. What has gone wrong?
If women want to do this, they should be allowed to do it, I guess. But to do it without any reference to the damage it does to women? No! Some women may make a lot of money out of prostitution, but mostly it’s the pimps who make the money. Surely it’s obvious that a woman cannot be available to strangers to have sex all the time and not be damaged by it. We do know that in our society it’s a buyers’ market and the buyers have the power. So, the man who’s paying for prostitution has the power. It’s incredibly sad that women subject themselves to that. The awful truth is that some men buy sex from prostitutes so they can do things to them that they wouldn’t dare try with their wives.
Sex has become very violent. How is choking part of sex?
I don’t know how we can get across to young women that any man who wants to inflict violence on you – you just need to say no and get him out of your life!
There has been some discussion amongst feminists that the contraceptive pill was the turning point that has led to the sexualisation of women and brought about the transgender ideology. What do you say to that?
Because we demanded to control our own reproductive system? That has made women fair game? Ridiculous. And I’m not sure I see any connection at all to the rise of the transgender movement. Totally crazy!
Feminism has been badly and I would say unfairly slandered to the point where being a feminist has become a dirty word.
That’s been happening for the duration of the movement – since Second Wave Feminism began its rise in the 1960s. Men have turned feminism into a bad word and the patriarchal propaganda worked. Many women were afraid of being labelled “feminist”. But we can’t do anything about that. We just have to keep repeating our message over and over. I’ve been doing that for 50 years and we still have a long way to go. You know, sometimes I laugh at how naïve I was as a young feminist. Some of us thought that all we needed to do was talk about the injustice of women’s oppression and men would say: ‘oh my goodness, yes, I hadn’t thought about that’, and everything would change. But the truth is that the men who violate women do so because they want to, not because they don’t understand what they are doing. We must know, your generation, my generation and the younger generation of feminists need to know that all we can do, in the face of the recalcitrance of patriarchy, is keep on going. Do not be silent. Do not shut up. Never give up. Occasionally we are given a little trickle of hope, and we feel like we have achieved something. We must be satisfied with that and not drop out of the movement. We need to be in this for the long haul. And we have to enjoy the battle!
We used to have a saying way back in the day: ‘if I can’t dance at the revolution I don’t
want to be there’. We have to enjoy what we are doing even though we are sometimes
desperately sad about it and distressed about the situation of women. Let’s enjoy the
company of other strong women, and keep fighting together.
If you would like to hear more from Betty, you can buy her books from Spinifex Press. The views expressed by the women interviewed in Local Action are their own and do not necessarily represent or reflect the positions of AAWAA.
