AAWAA brings to you ‘Local Action’, interviews with women getting it done across Australia. In this edition of Local Action we talk Janet Fraser. Janet is a mother, author, poet, and historian. Janet has been the National Convenor of the Australian homebirth network, Joyous Birth since 2004. She is a Spinifex author, the writer of Born Still: A Memoir of Grief and she writes about feminism, history, human rights, birth and parenting. Janet is the Convenor of the Feminist Legal Clinic Inc management committee and is well known by feminists across Australia as the face of the WDI Webinars. Janet was the 2023 Winner of the IWD Meanjin Brisbane Eva Bacon Award for her work promoting Women’s Rights in Australia. Janet has been getting it done!
Have you been a feminist all your life?
I guess I was a child in the second wave; however, there have been a lot of women who would debate that it has been a wave and say it has been a constant, with occasionally surfacing so others can notice it. Thus the term waves. I was a child in the 70s and that is when I first heard about feminism. We had the Female Eunuch – the original print is at home. My mother and her friends considered themselves feminists. I come from the left wing and trade unionism so for me it was taking those principles and applying them to women. Which in my family no one had done explicitly although my mum had been through activism that related to women. My mother was one of the first of women teachers receiving equal pay to men. That was a really important stand out life experience for her. My parents were also in the Vietnam Moratoriums. They were absolutely strong traditional lefties but also kind of bohemian. They had moved from the working class into the middle class and my grandparents were very left wing and working class and conscious of it. My maternal grandfather had been a marvellous trade unionist who had been blacklisted from the NSW railways for trying to unionise the railways. He was always very concerned with safety and the safety of men doing very dangerous jobs. He was a powder monkey so he had to blow up hills and mountains and there was no safety equipment, of course. That’s what I come from. That sort of constant interest in leftishness has been my whole life which is why it is fascinating now to be called right wing; I’m just not.
I went to an all-girls school where being a feminist was very cool. When I finished school, I did meet a real feminist for the first time, and I become heavily in feminist action in Sydney and I have not stopped since. Sometimes I am in the foreground, sometimes the background. I did a TV interview in 1992 for International Women’s Day and I chaired the rally – because everyone else was too scared to speak in public and I wasn’t. Then I was involved in a lot of lesbian action. I was involved in the Lesbian Space Project like a lot of other women. The fight for lesbian and gay rights was really strong in the ’90s. As feminists we thought we were doing pretty well. We had feminists in government positions; we had a ring of women’s networks and whenever we had a feminist event there was always a sort of running list for who would like to speak. It was always the Migrant Women’s groups because refugee women were really important, Solidarity groups, for example solidarity groups with South America and the Chilean women talking about living under Pinochet and being tortured and disappeared. We were very conscious of women’s lives in Ireland and what we shared with them at that time, abortion being a crime in NSW too. So we were very conscious that this was a global moment and we felt that we had achieved a lot, right?!
In the 1990s we felt that we had achieved a lot, right?
There I was working on lesbian and gay rights. The basic message then was, “Can you please not kill us?” Then the marriage rights debate arrived overnight, and I was stunned by how fast it worked. Now I put that in a different context of the backlash against feminism.
I then fell in love and moved to Melbourne and I basically stopped doing anything activist for a while there. I had my first child in 2003 and that was a very traumatic experience because of how I was treated in hospital after I had transferred in from a homebirth. I thought if white middle class assertive women like me are experiencing this what are what are women who don’t have my advantages experiencing? That is when I started Joyous Birth, the Australian homebirth network. We had many years of bitter struggle over homebirth at the time which we largely lost.
It was once I was back in NSW and my babies had grown up a bit that I was first called a transphobe, or something similar. That was in 2010, and I felt like, what the fuck? I had heard about this stuff in the early 90s from older lesbians who had said to me if we give space to men, it becomes men’s space. Back then there was a lot of discussion about lesbian and gay rights and whether we can fall under the same umbrella and work together. This is post the peak of the AIDS epidemic. There was lots of joking about whether lesbians and gay men could have a coalition because it seemed almost possible. Some thought we could work together. Absolutely not, it turned out! What’s going to happen – what will happen – is the men will encroach on women’s space and that will be the end of that.
It was in the early 1990s that I had my first experience of heterosexual people calling themselves queer. They asked to join the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence of which I was a member. The few women who were in the group were all, hell no! But the men were saying, they’re cute, we should let them in. So this straight couple became involved. I was quite bemused by the whole thing. At one point we were out somewhere and there was an antique dentist chair and the guy said something like that would be a good thing to have. I said, “Who would want a dentist’s chair?” and he said, “What if you had dental fantasies?” and I thought, well that would make you weird. It later turned out these people thought their weird sexual fetishes were what made them the same as gay and lesbian people. I was staggered by that. It was like an early window into that stuff. I believe it was 2010 when I first was called a transphobe. “You’ll never get anywhere in Australian feminism, Janet, because you’re a transphobe.” What the fuck? I said, what do you mean? And she said, well, you only ever talk about birthing women. Well, yes. That’s because women give birth and have babies. She was friends with Viv Smythe, and she was the one who was credited for first using the term TERF. She wanted a way to differentiate between the nice radical feminists and the mean radical feminists. This was approximately 2010 to 2012. Probably closer to 2010. But I don’t know when the term TERF got currency. I want to ask her now if she is proud of how her term TERF worked out. If she is proud of how it is used? How does she feel about it being used against women. Did she see it as being used that way. I bet she didn’t.
She claims it was just a neutral term for differentiating between feminists who accepted trans women as women and those who didn’t, which may indeed be the case. She most certainly had no idea of how it would be used by men. This is how the term would take off., But it only takes five minutes for any term for women to become pejorative. Look at the use of the term Karen to silence women. As soon as I hear anyone use Karen I switch off. I can’t come at the idea that they are calling the eSafety commissioner eKaren. Of all the things you can use to insult the eSafety commissioner about, the one you choose is that she is a woman. It’s irrelevant to her behaviour.
Do you think that Viv knew that to mainstream society all radical feminists are TERFs?
Well, I would consider those women the epitome of liberal feminism. I don’t think they considered themselves that, but they are. In the 1990 as I was growing into the full feminist flower I had this impression that there were different strands of feminism and what I now recognise as liberal feminism, is was what I called the femocrats: the bureaucratic feminists. They were different from those of us who did the grass roots work. They were women who ran groups like the Women’s Electoral Lobby, which has now gone to the trans. Or women who ran government departments. Women who were standing on the street (radical feminists) and those women who had a role who were not out on the street (femocrats). We used to get 3000 to 4000 women on the streets of the city to march for International Women’s Day. We would have a a big rally in Hyde Park. We had women musicians, speakers, we had the mothers’ groups and the lesbian groups, we had lesbian mothers’ groups. Back before lesbian mothers were subsumed, and any kind of lesbian mothering groups became meaningless because lesbian mothers were sandwiched between men who purchased babies from exploited women and men who pretend they are women and hence become mothers. So activism for lesbian mothers is meaningless now. Just like the women warned me about in the 1990s.
They were prophets!
Yes, they could see what was going to happen. They really could.
Why don’t we listen to previous generations of women more closely?
Well, that is something I contemplate a lot as a woman who has been a feminist activist for a long time. Why can we not hear when other women tell us the reality of their lives? Why can we not hear them and make better choices in their lives? Why? The greyer my hair gets the less young women want to listen to me. The answer is patriarchy of course.
For example, I’ve written a lot about the idea that women’s stories of birthing are ‘horror stories.’ That women are trying to scare other women. It’s not that women went into the fire and came out and they are trying to save you from going into the fire. They dismiss our stories. It’s been the same with the trans stuff. It’s conveyed to women as just women who are angry man haters and trans haters. So, when a woman warns us about stuff we don’t listen. The greyer my hair gets the less young women want to listen unless they are clued in on TERFery or they are old enough to remember the vibrancy and diversity of the women’s movement in the 1970s. We have knowledge that might be useful. I remember in the last year or so Stassja Frei asked me, “How did you keep the men out?” I said, “They just didn’t turn up!” We didn’t have to worry about advertising women’s events. Yeah sure occasionally you would get some dickhead wandering in but mostly women had ways to deal with that stuff because they had been though the ’70s. It was a very radicalising period and a lot of women had done self-defence. So what would happen is that lesbians would surround a man and like white blood cells, transport him out of the space. I had a friend who was a bouncer in a pub and she was 6 foot tall, lanky, didn’t have a muscle in her body but had a very imposing middle class presence and would just jab her finger in a man’s breast bone and he’d just go. But the thing was the social agreement about women’s spaces was strong then. People, even though they didn’t recognise the political nature of it, knew that the ladies had a section of the bar that was ladies only. We knew the ladies had the women’s toilets. We knew women had mothers’ groups that were for mothers only. In schools there used to be mothers’ clubs and I remember when I was young a man saying I would like to join the mothers club but wouldn’t because of the name. The women said if you come along and contribute we might change the name of it. He never did. There were all these boring, acceptable ideas about women and men having their own spaces. It worked for women’s refuges and worked for women’s dances and lesbian spaces. However by the 1990’s there was the odd bloke in a frock trying to get into the lesbian spaces. There were so many lesbian spaces by that time that women could go through their whole lives and rarely even meet a man. Whether you were bushwalking, needed a vet or wanted to organise a party or needed a lawyer we had a lesbian business for you advertising in the lesbian press.
So, you are not against men having their own spaces as long as they are not preventing women from accessing political places or places of power?
Yes. But remember when you are dealing with anything to do with men, women are always to blame. When men murder us women are to blame. When men take over our spaces wearing our clothing we are to blame. So if one in one hundred abusive men loses custody of his children in court the mother is to blame. Women are not denying men can have their own spaces.
My view on this subject has changed a bit over the last few years. I still feel resentful about men’s sheds because it is a bit like the social equivalent of the family, right? In our homes, do women have a room? Not usually. After the kids move out you might be able to get a sewing room. After I moved out my mother turned my room into an ironing room. My father had a room. It had two pianos in it. It wasn’t called Dad’s room but it was his room. It had a lot of antiques and books about music, and two pianos. It was his room. Where did mum have? For me the men’s sheds are the same but on social scale. Of course, they get a space that’s partially government funded, made for them. But what do women have? The women get a She Shed and it has to be painted pink so that no one thinks we are men. God forbid. So I have a residual resentment about men’s sheds. But as we have progressed through this bullshit I appreciate the fact that we have single sex spaces. I do have to agree what is good for the goose is good for the gander. So we need to suck it up. Men can have spaces for just men. I just reject that the resources always go towards men and that spaces which invoke power should be male only.
Janet’s Interior Design Tips.
Every woman needs a space for herself. Mothers are everywhere and hence nowhere.
Women deserve a space in their home. Do a pie graph. Draw a map of your house. Mark out your space, what is his space and what is shared space. You may need more space.
The problem is we don’t call men-only spaces, men’s spaces. We just call them the world. When women carve out a bit then it becomes a women’s space and that becomes a problem because women can’t have women’s spaces. They don’t see themselves as having men only spaces. But most of the world is a men only space. Any inroads that women make are not the norm and men find it offensive.
Men-only spaces are the norm in the same way that men’s bodies are the norm. Thus women’s bodies are pathological. I can’t imagine what it is like to walk around in the default human form. Everything is tailored to you, especially if you are a heterosexual man. The whole world is tailored to heterosexual men. It’s tailored to their body types. Car seats and seat belts are one example. They are tailored to the male body. I’m sure there are some heterosexual males for whom pornography is the antithesis of sexuality (maybe four or five of them). But that sense of woman as commodity, as a background to selling cars, or Tupperware or anything, constantly underscores that it is a man’s world. I don’t know what it is like to have the entire world made for me; a world in which I am the central organising principle. I had to read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez to discover there is such a thing as town planning which favours women. It makes it safer and easier to get around in public. It exists. Principles of design that will make it more likely women will access your space. She gives this amazing example – if you want girls and women to use the sports oval you need to make the gate wider. If men congregate around the narrow gate to the oval women will not go in. If the gate is several people wide, even if men congregate around it, women will go in. This is because women will not put themselves in a confined space with a man, even if it is outdoors. We won’t put ourselves in a confined space with men. When we change language and talk about people instead of women when we are talking about birth, pregnant women tune out because they know that it is not about them. They know people means men. When the language is changed to say pregnant people instead of pregnant woman then women will tune it out. Research exists showing that car seats and belts are not made for women. Women have the choice of having the seatbelt across their neck or between their breasts or on the side of the breast. Clearly designed with the male chest in mind! I’m short and I find when I am in public and I sit on some chairs I can swing my feet in the air like a child.
You are also a writer!
I have only written one book, Born Still: A Memoir of Grief. But I have written many journal articles, poems and blogs.
Janet, let’s talk about menopause. I am 47 and I am going through peri menopause. I am embracing my Crone Phase!
Yes! You know you are in the Maga phase! The four phases of woman are Maiden, Mother, Maga, Crone which represents a four-stage archetype for the feminine life cycle, expanding on the traditional ‘Triple Goddess’ (Maiden, Mother, Crone) to include the Maga stage, which signifies a time of harvest, wisdom, and empowered self-expression, often during midlife and menopause. I think to think of the Maga or Mage stage as an invisible stage when you are no longer Mother but not yet crone. But you are in the middle. This framework aligns with the seasons of the year (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) and the phases of the moon, providing a way for women to connect with different aspects of their inner landscape.
It is often seen as confrontational to discuss the phases a woman goes through.
Old women are the worst women according to patriarchy. But actually, from an evolutionary perspective we are very important. Are you familiar with the Grandmother Theory of Evolution?
As I became perimenopausal and menopausal I thought a lot about the grandmother hypothesis. Whenever I have changes to my body that change how I function from how I was functioning before I went thought through menopause I think, what is the evolutionary advantage of this?” For example, a lot of us can’t sleep in any more. I wake up at 5-6am and I will not sleep anymore. I wonder if this is because when were in a cave, mothers have breastfed all night so older women take care of the babies while they can sleep. We take the babies out into the forest and forage and hunt for small animals and make breakfast. We would bring the babies back to the mothers to feed. We may have still been breastfeeding. We have ways to comfort babies so they would not attract predators and so we can support mothers and babies.
Our lives have become so unnatural. When you think about PMT and other problems women face, I wonder howe much of it is a product of our modern living. We are living life so out of balance and so far from our ancestral diet. We also live in artificial lighting and all of these thing impact us as a species. We would not force animals to live the lives we live. We try not to stress out zoo animals, right? We don’t put spotlights on them at night and we try to let them live a life as close to natural as possible, despite the fact that they are confined. But we don’t allow that for humans. I struggle to think that medieval peasants struggled and were sick every month with PMT while working in the fields. Birth is normal, puberty is normal, perimenopause is normal. We are told every day it is a really bad thing and we must take drugs and hormones. I feel like time moving on is normal and we don’t choose times for events, our bodies choose. Maybe we should let our bodies divest of our hormones in our time at our own pace. I struggle with the idea that we can choose, when it is our bodies that choose the correct time. It’s like dyeing hair. Why would I start dyeing my hair to hide grey? When do we stop dyeing our hair? When we are in our 80s? Why not just let the body decide?
It seems like the patriarchy is controlling woman and how women’s bodies work. Especially in the last 100 years.
Without capitalism, patriarchy may be different but we are in the nexus of capitalism and patriarchy. I find the whole discussion of men taking women’s hormone very interesting. I’m only half joking when I say maybe the men should be welcome to it and then most of us can just let our bodies do what they do naturally. We’re just undoing puberty. Puberty was a process and we go through it. Most of the time people get through it and no one tries to drug you to get through it. But we don’t have the same response to menopause. Maybe women’s experiences also reflect the fact that we are, in the main, hideously stressed. There is no village, we can’t just leave it up to someone else and say we’ll have a lie down. It is also the most intense part of women’s careers if they are working outside the home and even if you work inside the home, you are still caught between your teenage kids and your elderly parents; hence the term sandwich generation. I like to look at different views of menopause from around the world and it’s interesting to note that in Japanese it’s called, konenki, meaning transition and change of life’s purpose – a much more positive view.
Most women know you from the WDI Feminist Webinars.
The only work I do for WDI is hold the monthly webinars. I am also the convenor for the management committee of Feminist Legal Clinic Inc though.
But then you decided to study law, and you have absolutely aced it.
Oh, thank you! Yes, I have finished my degree in law. It is my last-ditch attempt to make a difference for women. I went back to university when the kids were teenagers. I could not have done it before that. They’re young adults now. They became adults while I was doing my law degree. I need to feed myself and whoever is living with me, into old age and I wanted to make a change for women. I’m working towards a practising certificate and I should be admitted in February next year.
We need to have the legal stuff in place. We need to remove gender identity from the Sex Discrimination Act. It just needs to go. It is a cult, and we need to somehow weed it out of our institutions. We need to somehow weed out the pernicious influence of ACON. If we can get rid of the Pride clubs in work places and get rid of the pernicious DEI we can make a difference for women. I think we will do it We will have a renaissance of women’s rights. Do we need to start breaking into houses and squatting to get women’s refuges the way we used it? Kind of yeah, we do! We need scholarships and literary prizes for women. We need new groups to set these things up for women, not for women and any man he says he is a woman. For women only! We need that space. I have very little hope of weeding gender identity out of the NGOs. There is no mechanism except changing the law and forcing them to recognise and accept that women are a sex that needs protection. The NGOs are now off on their own self junketing and there is no incentive for them to change other than the law. Since the clarification of the law in the UK that says that woman is a sex category that does not include men, those places have continued to break the law and are now facing lawsuits. That might have to happen in Australia too.
We also need to have a game plan for what we are going to do when we get rid of this nonsense. We need to think about future proofing organisations such as women’s refuges, for instance. The fight for funding of women’s refuges was deep and bitter. The woman who said we can’t take government funding because it will make us vulnerable to government were right. But who could have foreseen what’s happened? I have every sympathy with the idea that government should be paying for that stuff however ultimately it left those systems vulnerable. Then they were given away to churches. At the same time as we were having an inquiry into the church’s response to child abuse we were giving vulnerable women and children away to those institutions. I have never been able to get my head around it.
Imagine your children watched you a law degree. What an amazing inspiration!
Or I scarred them for life.
But really, they have seen me work all their lives, known that I’m on the telly, and I’m in the newspaper, and I have fought for women’s rights my whole life. That is just the background to their lives. For them is probably just ‘that’s another thing Mum is doing’. Maybe when they are older and have kids, maybe they will look at what I did and think maybe it was different from the average upbringing.
Where did gender identity come from?
I think it came from a variety of sources including academia. I also think it is a violent backlash to the success of feminism. In the 1990s we were doing so well. Then the internet came and so did the age of mass pornography. Equal marriage is another pillar in the backlash against women. It is about bringing gay men into the fold. Patriarchy doesn’t care if men like other men, it only cares if men will stand with other men. Gay men then had no reason to stand with women. While I think there are definitely billionaire players in the US and I do think there are some billionaires who have made it to a cult, overall, I think this has been the perfect storm and women are the victims.
I’m excited for the renaissance that is coming but let’s never forget this time. They will try to brush this under the rug and pretend they knew the whole time that people can’t change sex and that sterilising children is wrong. But they will also say that they couldn’t agree with those mean TERFs because we were so mean and cruel for calling men, men. How dare we be so cruel?! We can forgive but we can never forget.
If you would like to hear more from Janet you can follow her on Facebook, X, buy her book and of course, attend the Aus/NZ WDI monthly webinars.
