In this entry I want to tell you the story of some of my earlier publications and how I ended up debating with myself over a particular issue – how the “problem” of “women’s inequality” was represented in women’s movement politics. Things might have been easier had I had the WPR approach to give me some guidance but in the cases I discuss here, WPR did not yet exist (and would not exist for a decade). It is possible, I believe, to see the emergence of the need for a WPR way of thinking in the material I proceed to analyse. 

I hope the story is of interest to you for other reasons as well. For one, it indicates that a researcher/theorist can and often does alter their position. It would be odd if that were not the case. What is more interesting is why they altered their position in this particular case, and what can be learnt from the episode. Second, I think the case reveals something about the “locatedness” of social theory. And third, the story indicates the reason WPR includes an undertaking to engage in self-problematisation. 

We will be looking at two books:

1. Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918. University of Toronto Press. First edition 1983. Reprinted in 1985 and 1987.
2. Same Difference: Feminism and Sexual Difference. Allen & Unwin, 1990. Scheduled for reissue in Routledge’s Revival Series, 2024.

https://www.routledge.com/9781032829739

I want to forecast two important points:

1. In the 1990 book in Chapter 1 fn 3 (p. 272) I state that “the author [me] has dramatically altered her interpretation since the publication of Liberation Deferred? in 1983”. 
2. The 1983 book was based on my PhD thesis, completed at McGill University in 1976 (now I’m ageing myself!). The 1976 thesis title reads: Liberation Deferred: The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918. The 1983 book is titled: Liberation Deferred? Etc. – where did the question mark after the word “deferred” come from? What does it mean?

The Context

Liberation Deferred? (University of Toronto Press, 1983) set out to understand the “ideas” that motivated the English-Canadian women and men who joined “woman suffrage” organisations and who campaigned for women’s right to vote in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. My PhD involved gathering the “information” for this study. I travelled across Canada visiting the archives in each province (state) where I sought out membership lists for woman suffrage societies and where I proceeded to identity the interests of those who joined by looking at their other memberships. I found that women suffrage campaigners forged alliances with temperance and social purity organisations, child welfare leagues, urban planning movements, anti-prostitution campaigns, and similar sorts of reform.

I also found that many were professionals, or were married to professionals. Their support for woman suffrage indicated their hope that women could lend their voices to the reform causes just mentioned and help to defend the social order against political unrest and the destabilising effects of rapid industrial growth. Women’s assumed role as “keepers of the hearth” suggested that they would eagerly rally to this endeavour. 

The Debate

Liberation Deferred? forms part of a long-standing debate on the nature of what is commonly called “first-wave feminism”, which includes the suffragists. Here I quote the publisher’s 1983 Foreword:

“Historians have at times castigated the women of this movement for accepting and reinforcing traditional sex-role stereotypes for women. More recently (this is written in 1983) emphasis has been placed on their solid contributions to female liberation as they extended woman’s domain from the domestic to the public sphere.”

My interpretation

Not to put too fine a point on it, in the 1983 book, I came down on the side of those who found the suffragists’ agenda for change limited. Indeed, in the Preface (p. viii), I stated: “the limitations of this type of feminism are fairly obvious”. I elaborated this stance on p. 11: 

“Because they belonged to a social group which considered the family the key to the progress of society and the race, they did not question the conventional allocation of sex roles”. 

While acknowledging the role of “more radical feminists” I described the majority as committed to Protestant morality, sobriety and the family order (p. 3). I adopted the label of “maternal feminism” to describe this cohort, claiming this was “its chief and only contribution to women’s status in this period”. 

In the Conclusion (p. 145-146) I took up the debate about whether the suffrage movement had failed or succeeded, and suggested that it had succeeded but only in terms of the limited goals I had described. Unwisely, I concluded that only some suffragists could “legitimately be called feminists”, those who “demanded complete equality of the sexes [yes, we said “sexes” not “genders” in those days], including equal educational and occupational opportunities”. I described these “few feminists” who challenged “the supposed blessings of wifehood and motherhood” as voices in the wilderness. With the “takeover of the suffrage movement by the social reformers”, I declared, the reform “became moderate in their hands”. 

Why the title changed: where did the question mark come from? 

The PhD thesis (title without the question mark) was completed in 1976. Due to my move from Canada to Australia I lost touch with the first potential publishers. So, the book appeared only in 1983. The University of Toronto Press editors kindly pointed out that the debate on the issues raised in the thesis had “moved on”. How was I to reflect these changes in the book? My solution –inserting the question mark after Liberation Deferred suggested that the certitude in the PhD about the “deferral” of “liberation” among “maternal feminists” (no question mark) had softened, that at least the issue was debatable. I now wish this position could be made clearer in the text. However, it is sadly too late for amendments. 

How I changed my mind (Same Difference 1990) 

In the footnote 3 for Chapter 1 in Same Difference (mentioned above), where I state that I had dramatically altered my interpretation, I also offer a few reasons for the alteration: “the discovery of the 1980s that equal opportunity and justice were further apart than at first estimated, and the quite remarkable outpouring of feminist analyses in the last decade (1980s)”. The point being made here is that I had become less enamoured of an “equal rights” approach to “women’s inequality”. I had been doing my reading and had come to realize that aspiring to “equality” with men produced a limited range of desirable changes, that it was necessary to challenge the male norm not to join it. 

Onto Same Difference (1990) 

The major argument in Same Difference is that disagreements among feminists about possible reforms reflect the institutional contexts that shaped the options available. I suggest that talking about women’s sameness to or difference from men, a persistent theme in the media and some scientific research even today, mystifies what is really going on. 

A major focus in Same Difference is the shape of feminist arguments and attempting to explain their genesis. Inevitably, then, I had to reflect on the debates about the suffrage movement I had dismissed in Liberation Deferred? I pointed out how the representations of the suffrage campaign picked up the language of “sameness” and “difference”:

“Here the interpretation has been that the movement occurred in two phases, an earlier phase (1848-1890) concerned mainly with asserting women’s and men’s common humanity (the justice [or sameness]) argument, followed by a later phase (1890-1920), which emphasised women’s differences (the expediency argument)”. [Same Difference, p. 19]

I proceeded to explain why I found these debates less than useful: “Any attempt to divide the movement into “justice” or “expediency” camps, therefore, oversimplifies the historical reality” and that most suffragists “claimed equal human status at the same time as eliciting women’s particular virtues” [Same Difference, p. 20; emphasis in original].

You may now, hopefully, see that I had indeed shifted position or “changed my mind”. 

In Liberation Deferred? I had insisted that the suffrage movement did not operate in a vacuum and that, to understand the participants, we needed to understand the conditions shaping their worlds and their other reform affiliations. This is a fair enough point and probably makes Liberation Deferred? relevant in histories of the suffrage moment. 

What I forgot is that commentators (on the suffrage movement) also do not operate in a vacuum. We too need to be located historically. I had grown up as an equal rights feminist in the 1960s and these views are reflected in Liberation Deferred?. The position taken in Same Difference reflects my disappointments with an equal rights agenda and, as mentioned, the “remarkable outpouring of feminist analyses”. 

If you read Same Difference, you will notice that there is no longer an attempt to identify “legitimate” feminists. I hope it displays a greater sensitivity to the challenges involved in improving “women’s” lives. 

Locating Same Difference

Does this mean that I am completely happy with Same Difference? In fact, I would say that my position has altered yet again. As I currently embrace a non-binary view of gender relations, I could no longer comfortably refer to “sex-specific characteristics” as I do in Same Difference. I need to do more thinking on this point (a bit more self-problematisation), but I suspect there could a way to link non-binary thinking to the argument in Same Difference:

“ ‘Sameness’ and ‘difference’ in some abstract sense therefore are not in dispute. In dispute is the nature of the social arrangements which inadequately cater for the personal side of people’s lives.” [Same Difference, p. 265]

Changing my mind

The larger argument in this rather discursive entry is that changing one’s mind is a positive thing not a negative thing. It indicates a willingness to keep thinking and to keep questioning. If we accept that our theories reflect our social/political location, changing one’s mind is also inevitable. 

I have changed my mind at other times over my career. I’d be happy to share these experiences if you think it worthwhile. Please let me know if you would like further entries such as this one. Contact me at: carol.bacchi@adelaide.edu.auAll the best. Carol