Making Trouble

Lynne Segal

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, September 22nd 2007

As a child of the 1970s, I take sexual equality for granted.  If I ever gave any thought to the feminists who made such complacency possible, it is to blame them for the fact that motherhood is no longer a socially acceptable career choice. I had never considered how hard it must be for the very women who made the personal the political to have their stories appropriated and rewritten by the next generation.

Lynne Segal’s memoir Making Trouble has given me considerable pause for thought. Subtitled Life and Politics, it is a considered reflection on both a life and a movement that changed the face of society. As a social psychologist, Sydney-born Segal is an acute observer of the way social forces shape perceptions of gender, race, culture and difference. She is also keenly aware that many witnesses are needed to make sense of the past and one’s own presence within it, drawing on the recollections of the people with whom the lived and worked through the 1960s and ‘70s, to augment her own experiences.

Details of her life are interwoven with analysis of the rise and demise of second-wave feminism, a movement whose genesis was driven by men and women who fought for the rights of all  minorities, not merely women. She is bitter about the way their reality has been appropriated and repackaged by the social and political mainstream, quick to identify them as men-hating, anti-family lesbians, ignoring both the diversity of views within the wide stream of feminists, and the substantial gains they achieved in arenas from employment to politics to culture.

The great gain was “co-parenting, a new gender division of labour. The society we fought for – the battle we lost – was to enable those with the commitment, ability and desire to do so, to look after those in need of domestic care…the idea of employing another woman as cleaner was unthinkable”.

While not denying there were things that her generation didn’t accomplish, and challenges that they did not forsee, there is only so much that any social movement which tries to blend activist goals with personal life can achieve before those collective ideals splinter into identity politics.

The direction taken by Britain under Margaret Thatcher was simply the final nail in the coffin of second-wave feminism. Now the baton has passed to the next generation, and Segal’s memoir is, among other things, an attempt to equip those who follow an understanding of the past and the lessons to be learned there.

The final section of the memoir deals with the culture of ageing (sexism re-emerges as women age, with older men far more able to enter new relationships than their female contemporaries), and how she has chosen to confront her own advancing years by looking backwards to a latent aspect of her identity, her Jewish heritage. She is an energetic activist in the cause of the Palestinian people, and her analysis of Zionism as an identity of victimhood is a challenging and provocative one, and shows she has lost none of her fire. Old feminists don’t die, they just move on to new causes.

Thankfully some, like Segal, leave a map of the past to guide the rest of us towards the future.