The Australian state and women’s struggles for abortion and equal pay 1968-1980

Abstract

My thesis offers an analysis of how the 1970s women’s campaigns for abortion rights and equal pay achieved significant improvements. The Australian state made concessions although the fundamentals of structural women’s oppression remained.

My explanation for these concessions relies on a Marxist understanding of Australian capitalism. I depart from most theories of oppression by situating women within a historical materialist analysis, recognising their diversity based on class, racialised and gendered backgrounds, informed by the recent Marxist feminist theory, Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), which locates women’s oppression in nuclear family relations (Bhattacharya, 2017).

I extend SRT to present an analysis based on what I call the ‘capital-state-family nexus’. The thesis offers a new framework for understanding the history of the state’s role in social reproduction. I argue that women’s oppression is shaped by the history of the Australian white colonial state and its relationship to women workers and the family.

The thesis describes the actions of people in state structures, illustrating the way gender and class interests interrelate to contain workers’ roles within capitalist social norms. Applying Callinicos’s (2009 [2005]) analysis of structure and human agency, I illuminate the way qualitative changes took place as the social circumstances after World War 2 intersected with a changing experience for women.

Radical women raised the need for state support for childcare, reproductive health, equal participation and remuneration. All women are oppressed, class struggle brought workers together against the economic interests of men and women in privileged positions. In strikes, women and male workers challenged sexism. Some unions campaigned around abortion rights. This thesis is a contribution to understanding the nature of capitalism that is gendered and racialised, and the potential power to challenge oppression in working class women’s struggle.