The late David Ireland AM (1927-2022) wrote his award-winning novel A Woman of the Future in a very particular moment in time…
All of us who were young women in the seventies had a series of unforgettable moments when we broke a gender-based psychological, social or legal barrier. For me, these moments ranged from the trivial to the momentous: when I wore a ‘pantsuit’ for the first time; when I refused to make tea for the boss at work; when I asked The Ex for ‘his’ car keys after I’d got my licence; when I rejected the purdah of the Ladies Lounge and had a much cheaper drink in the public bar; when I demanded to know why I couldn’t apply for a job that I’d been acting in for months; and when my boss negotiated with the Premier and his Deputy to allow me to continue working in the public service after I’d got married despite the regulations… He was white with exhaustion when he came back and told me the news.
Me? I took it for granted. My newly minted sense of self had assumed that approval was a foregone conclusion since it was none of their business whether I was married or not and the justice of women’s rights was inalienable.
Only much later did I realise that he could have just as easily have waved his uppity young clerk goodbye… and I wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it.
The thing is, as David Ireland shows so brilliantly in A Woman of the Future, in the 60s and 70s nobody knew what the outcome of the women’s movement might be. We were all making leaps of faith, large and small, one after the other.
(One great leap of faith for women was in 1901, when men voted to give women the vote in the newly federated Australian parliament. No one knew then how that would work out either. But as historian Clare Wright concludes in You Daughters of Freedom (2018, see my review) women used their vote to make Australia the most progressive nation on the planet in the era before WW1. It’s a pity that’s not the case any more.)
A Woman of the Future has some confronting aspects, and Bill’s dismissive 2015 review at The Australian Legend prompted a riposte from Bonny Cassidy in 2018 at The Sydney Review of Books. But I see A Woman of the Future as a book that lends itself to all kinds of readings, all of which may be equally valid.
Or not:
They said: the series of events in the mind cannot be understood as a coherent pattern, only as observed, separate, even fragmented parts of a jumble. You cannot say: This inventory can be totalled and has such and such a meaning: all you can say is: it is there. (p.326)
(Richard Flanagan says much the same thing in his new book Question 7. More about that later.)
A Woman of the Future is a very slippery novel. I read it through the lens that interested me most, i.e. as an exploration of the issue signalled by its title: what might a woman of the future be? What might happen when parenting adapts to new ideas about gender roles and expectations? How will the children — boys and girls — behave? What will they be like as adults? How will men react to the challenge to their authority? Do sexual relationships adapt? Or not…
What made us not know? Why were we uncertain of our identity? Surely other races, other times, other people were born knowing exactly what they were and where they fitted in. (p.287)
Alethea Hunt is the subject of a parenting experiment in a partly recognisable world. Her mother has withdrawn from her expected role entirely and has abandoned all domestic responsibilities to her husband who thrives at domesticity. Alethea claims in this purportedly posthumous collection of her writings to be able to remember her life in the womb and very early childhood when her mother’s love was overt, but now in this inversion of roles Mother is more like the stereotypical father who is absent at work. She spends most of her time in her room writing, recording minute day to day observations. A diarist of her times? It’s not clear: I kept thinking of Casaubon labouring away on his meaningless magnus opus… and yet, such momentous change was worthy of documentation, surely?
(The brains behind the Mass-Observation Archive during WW2 thought so, and so did those behind the persistent requests for us to record our pandemic experiences for posterity. Which I ignored, for reasons explained in my review of Blitz Spirit (2020), compiled by Becky Brown.)
In a sustained metaphor for the metamorphosis of society, Ireland introduces Alethea’s school companions and neighbours in a social hierarchy of Frees and Servers. In an ironic inversion of the usual dystopias, the Frees are mutants who engage in meaningless work to keep them busy while the Servers are the professional class, selected at the conclusion of school to qualify for tertiary education and real work. The mutants grow peculiar changes in their bodies: a plank emerges from a man’s body and becomes a coffin; a boy who is gradually solidifying into a sculpture takes care to arrange his all-important appendage to be impressive; a child whose feet adhere to any surface is allowed to roam the classroom at will and becomes a competitive runner.
It is Alethea’s metamorphosis, however, that is the main subject of the book. Raised not to be a ‘girl’ but as an equal, she explores her world with enthusiasm. In class, she confounds the stereotype of the disruptive boy student, and her curiosity extends to sex. In multiple discomfiting episodes, she inverts the notion that ‘girls play at sex to get love and boys play at love to get sex’. She and the other girls don’t care at all about love…
There was a great demand for our bodies. We girls didn’t put all that much value on what our bodies represented: they did that. We simply went along with it. We were necessary; it brought advantages. Little things, it’s true, but little things were all that males could give.
In truth, those little things — the dinners, the sights, the money, the drives, the gifts, the sexual exercise — were all they had to give. (p.284)
With the advent of The Pill, anything else was flushed away.
Alethea cannot be bothered with pandering to the male idea of what an attractive girl looks like.
Later, once the males got the idea that our bodies were to us no more than theirs were to them, our value would vanish. They would say we weren’t attractive.
Those of us who cared least for our toilet, the boys rejected first. But in general, by the time we showed this casual disregard for the magic they saw in our bodies — which we had never understood — we would be middle-aged, tied down by children we had borne and supported.
And to us their bodies held precious little of the magic ours did for them. (p.285)
Instead of conferring the respect that men assume is their birthright, Alethea doesn’t conceal her disdain.
My attitudes hardened, my ambitions were forming, however vague they might be. I would be as good as any man: as brave, as strong, as ruthless, as independent, as benevolently contemptuous of others.
I invented the Super Jump, and kids from the streets around competed to beat me at it.
And what do the boys do? They try to beat Alethea’s best effort:
They all thought — all of them, big and small, weak and strong — that the weakest of them could start from my best effort! They didn’t, and they couldn’t, and they went away swearing and never referring to the Super Jump again.
I didn’t miss the lesson contained in their way of learning what I showed them: their arrogance, their confidence, in dismissing defeat from their minds. Because it was a female that won, the contest wasn’t worth competing in.
I don’t deny my own confidence that I would be as good as any male. The next step to consider was their arrogance: their unreasoning; their bashing-their-heads-against-a-brick-wall persistence, confidence, optimism in other things they did. For somewhere in there was their secret, the secret that made miserable little boys think that they could compete with a large, well-built, athletic girl, and start, and expect to progress from, her maximum mark. (p.162-3)
The horror of this parental experiment and Alethea’s venture into overt competition with men in her adolescence, is that they do win. They join forces to take away her free will in matters of sexuality, and they defile her confidence in her own equality and well-earned power. It is awful to read.
The question is, did Ireland mean his novel to warn the brave and confident Aletheas of his era about the possibility of brutal vengeance from defeated Australian males threatened by what was coming? Was he showing that the kind of men he wrote about in The Glass Canoe were not going to respond to the changes in Australian society with grace and generosity or a sense of how it might benefit them in the long run?
Or is it a misogynistic expression of ‘serves-you-right’ from an author whose spiteful pen can put down his uppity female character and teach her a lesson about knowing her place?
*wry smile* If I could work out why Ireland made Alethea transition into a leopard and take off into the bush, I might have an inkling as to what his intentions were…
The reviews of A Woman of the Future contemporary with its publication are the most interesting, because IMO, they don’t have — couldn’t have had — the wisdom of hindsight based on decades of feminism. Four (from The Atlantic, the Australian Book Review, the NY Times, and The Washinton Post) are usefully harvested by Michael Orthofer at The Complete Review, where you can also read his own review from 2023.
David Ireland won the Miles Franklin Award three times, for The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971, see my review), The Glass Canoe (1976, see my review) and A Woman of the Future in 1979, which also won The Age Book of the Year in 1980.
-
- 1976
Author: David Ireland
Title: A Woman of the Future
Publisher: George Brazilier, New York, 1979 (First edition)
Jacket design by Nancy Kirsh
ISBN: 0807609250, hbk., 351 pages
Source: Personal library
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I must admit that I’ve not read Ireland. I’ve never been sure I wanted to but I also feel I ought to.
Interesting in you PS experience and being expected to leave when you married. Was that the state public service? By the time I started in the Commonwealth Public Service in 1975 married women were working and had been since around 1966. No one was even talking about it except occasionally during discussions about the women’s movement as something in the distant past.
LikeLike
By: whisperinggums on December 14, 2023
at 9:56 pm
Oh, it was well sorted out by 1975. We’d had the Whitlam government, and Ann Summers and the Office of Status for Women, WEL, the list goes on!
But still, I’m surprised that ‘no one was talking about it.’ In teaching, everywhere I worked over a 45 year career, there were women who had had to resign and then come back at the very bottom of the seniority ladder. We didn’t get promotion by merit until the early 1990s. We certainly talked about it in the union movement and in the staff room.
And some of those women I knew left work with meagre superannuation and are getting by on the pension.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 14, 2023
at 10:03 pm
Well the thing is merit was the basis of selection in the CPS (now APS) by the mid 1970s. I applied for and got my first promotion in 1976 as a librarian in my second year. “Seniority” did still come into play back then but only when the top candidates were of equal merit. That of course was open to some abuse, but I didn’t see much of it. It was an argument used in appeals. But seniority for even that purpose went pretty soon. I remember it happening though I can’t remember the exact date. My memory though is by the late 70s or maybe early 80s.
Women of our generation in the public service had superannuation but some of my friends worked longer than I did ie past the earliest retirement age because they had resigned when they had children. Back then when you resigned you could take your superannuation out. Many did and paid for extensions, or paid off mortgages etc. That meant they started from scratch when they returned to work a few years later. Although I had some breaks in my career – husband’s overseas postings and maternity leave – I never resigned so I preserved my benefits. When I retired they were lower than if I’d not had those breaks and had I not worked part-time for much of the time but they were enough, particularly given I had a partner who also had superannuation. My friends ended up with enough too but worked till they were older because of that decision they’d made to take their money.
TBH the big public service feminist issue for us at that time was the provision of work-based child care, and how there mustn’t be child care – noise and mess of kiddies – in the parliamentary triangle!! That was 1970s too.
LikeLike
By: whisperinggums on December 14, 2023
at 10:48 pm
Anyhow, good on you for standing up!
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: whisperinggums on December 14, 2023
at 10:00 pm
This post explains your comment on mine about Claire Keegan. I’m not sure I fancy trying to make sense of this novel. Are Australian men really any less enlightened than others? Those attitudes of innate male superiority still exist in my experience here in 21C UK.
LikeLike
By: Tredynas Days on December 14, 2023
at 10:27 pm
Afterthought: in my teaching career in colleges there were very few senior managers who were women- but that did start to change around the late 90s. My mum never had paid employment until all of us kids had left home. Then she got a parttime job in a shop. For pin money, as my dad would see it.
LikeLike
By: Tredynas Days on December 14, 2023
at 10:31 pm
*chuckle*
I don’t know whether Australian men are or were any better or worse than men anywhere else, I was specific in my review because Ireland is imagining Australian people, as he knew them, at that time. (I think I read somewhere that he’d never been out of Australia?)
But it’s also important to note that he was writing in the 1970s, when all this change was happening and men had to adjust to it. I think that if I took a straw poll of men of my generation I would find that most of them (as predicted by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch) have embraced the changes and the benefits they bring. But there are also tragic cases of women being murdered because their husbands have a patriarchal attitude towards the women in their lives, and their ‘possession’ has declined to behave like one. And in some relationships, the idea of equality is shallow and in times of conflict the real attitudes erupt.
It’s hard to know because relationships within families are still mostly kept private. As Ireland says, these things “cannot be understood as a coherent pattern, only as observed, separate, even fragmented parts of a jumble’.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 15, 2023
at 11:03 am
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner is a contender for Great Australian Novel (IMO of course) and I saw AWotF as very liberated when it first came out, but from a guy’s pov.
I appreciate your feminist POV, but I don’t trust Ireland enough to believe that that was his intention. In all his books, including The UIP, women are to be used and discarded.
LikeLike
By: wadholloway on December 14, 2023
at 11:04 pm
Well, this is a polarising novel, it was even in its day. I’ve linked to your review so that people can make up their own minds.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 15, 2023
at 11:04 am
This is one reason why it is so frustrating that most of Ireland’s later novels remain unpublished. One of them, “Desire”, is said to be about a woman who tortures a man to death. Maybe that would redress the balance a bit.
LikeLike
By: bikerpaul68 on December 18, 2023
at 9:02 pm
Gosh…
I read in Lumby’s bio of Frank Moorhouse that some of his novels (a-hem) exploring desire remain unpublishable, and I wondered what that meant.
I mean, today, there’s the commercial imperative which rules everything (except for some small indie publishers), but there’s also cancel culture and there’s a predisposition to ‘redressing the balance’ in other ways e.g. the marginalised speaking up for themselves. None of this is censorship but it distorts the market for books IMO.
My guess is that some would say that such a book might be publishable if written by a woman, but not by a man.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 19, 2023
at 9:34 am
For all of its serious flaws, there was something to be said about the equality of working women under Communist regimes – and this is one of the things East German women miss most after reunification. And the childcare and other family-friendly policies that made it possible for them to be in the workplace.
LikeLike
By: MarinaSofia on December 14, 2023
at 11:04 pm
Yes, I’ve heard that said.
People don’t like to acknowledge that there was anything good about the Soviets, but for women, perhaps especially for peasant women, there were benefits that can’t be denied.
I read a book recently… Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina, which was most illuminating on that very subject. It concerned a Tartar woman living on a farm, and dekulakisation liberated her from the drudgery and brutality of life with her husband (who was killed for refusing to cooperate with Stalin’s goons.) At the time I read it, I’d never heard *anything* good about dekulakisation and or about the kulaks in Siberia so (though it doesn’t romanticise anything) this story that shows this woman transformed into an enterprising, independent person was a revelation to me. And it was apparently based on the life of the author’s grandmother. Clearly, the author wouldn’t even have had an education if things had gone on the way they were before the revolution.
Among many reasons why the Soviets defeated Germany in WW2 was the fact that they were making full use of the entire population. The Brits did this too, but not to the extent of having women fighting on the front line. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich shows that women were fighting on land, at sea and in the air, and they contributed to the war effort in factories and on farms etc whereas German women were confined to roles within the family.
This is one of the reasons I find foreign fiction so interesting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: Lisa Hill on December 15, 2023
at 11:22 am
Hmm, am in two minds as to whether I would like this book or not. I found The Glass Canoe quite confronting.
To answer Tredynas Days comment above about whether Australian men are any less enlightened than others, from my experience (which includes 20 years in UK) I think sexism/misogyny is more overt in Australia. In the UK it’s more hidden, it’s built into the systems. It’s the same with violence: in the UK it is latent, brimming just under the surface (all those signs warning people not to assault customer service staff in post offices, train stations etc used to shock me), but in Australia it’s out in the open – you see and hear the violence. Or maybe it’s just where I live. LOL.
Finally, how surprising to see Bill’s thoughts on a book generating some controversy on the internet *chuckle*
LikeLike
By: kimbofo on December 16, 2023
at 5:36 pm
Yes, and I like the way she tagged him as a scholar too!
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 16, 2023
at 6:01 pm
In my opinion, Bonny Cassidy writing on her review that Bills “blog post winds me up.” seems a tad over the top. I am very keen on Ireland, as any who has read my scribbling on him well knows, but I get why some may not be as keen. I liked her review, even if I personally think this one has not stood the test of time.
LikeLike
By: fourtriplezed on December 17, 2023
at 2:35 pm
Actually I rather liked it, that she has a passionate response that provoked her review. I mean, most of the people who write for those university review sites are often dispassionate and so deeply analytical that it seems they don’t really care.
But I also liked that she was a woman reviewing it. I remember wondering when I reviewed The Glass Canoe if there were a difference in the way that women and men read Ireland. The spaces he inhabited in the two novels I’d read then (The factory in Unknown Industrial Prisoner, and the public bar in The Glass Canoe) were spaces that were off-limits to women. So men reading those novels would recognise the blokey types he used in his characters, whereas women who were excluded from places where men behave badly, would be surprised by the contrast.
And now, of course, both men and women have moved on and so there’s the historical dimension as well.
Not to mention the class dimension too!
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 17, 2023
at 2:56 pm
I don’t disagree at all with the premise of anything you have written, Ireland observed his male world in both Prisoner and Canoe, and mine for a while I might add. Women seemed an odd one to get “wound” up about IMO even if I enjoyed the analysis.
It saddens me to say this, but David Ireland will be hardly read into the future, and is hardly read now outside a few literary types now. Even Bonny Cassidy’s passionate defence was about a book of its time. I could not imagine anyone publishing it now.
LikeLike
By: fourtriplezed on December 19, 2023
at 6:28 am
Well, I know this sounds naff, but the reason I read this one is because I make spasmodic efforts to read all the Miles Franklin winners.
But leaving Ireland aside, many of our best writers of the past would not get published now. (See my reply to BikerPaul68 above).
And conversely, much of what is published now wouldn’t have been published in the past.
In the Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, Ireland is noted as a precursor to the so-called Western Sydney novel which IMO is basically grunge lit in a particular location. This hints at some scholarly interest… I wonder if there is a bio in the pipeline.
I really did admire The World Repair Video Game. When I read it in 2016, I thought the satire was clever, and I identified it as a political novel. What I did not foresee then was the way the central character was a forerunner of the ‘cookers’ who burst onto the streets during the pandemic and have not gone away. That had such a small print run that hardly anybody read it, which is a real shame.
LikeLiked by 1 person
By: Lisa Hill on December 19, 2023
at 9:51 am
(Trying to post this again.) Well, one of Ireland’s late novels (“The World Repair Video Game, 2015”) has been published, although only 500 copies were printed by the small Tasmanian publisher (Island Magazine). I have just re-read the afterword by Geordie Williamson, which begins by describing “Desire” and goes on to say that “A Woman of the Future” is characterized by “violence and misogyny” and suggests that these tendencies “erode[d] his standing”. But “The World Repair Video Game” is told in the first person by a serial killer, and it got published. If some kind of political correctness is stopping us from reading the later works of a man who in the 1990’s was considered one of Australia’s leading novelists, I think it’s a great pity. We should be allowed to read them and decide for ourselves. I believe all the MSs are in the NSW State Library.
LikeLike
By: bikerpaul68 on December 19, 2023
at 8:50 pm
I hear you.
I reject reading books that feature explicit child abuse, but they get published too.
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 19, 2023
at 11:14 pm
Oddly enough I have just finished watching a German film (English title, “The Child I Never Was”), a dramatized documentary about a teenager who tortured and murdered four boys younger than him. It was worth watching, although very unpleasant. Doubtless there are people who would ban it.
LikeLike
By: bikerpaul68 on December 20, 2023
at 12:44 am
There are some confronting scenes in Game of Thrones too…
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 20, 2023
at 10:22 am
PS I’ve just found Bonny Cassidy’s 2018 review. All I would say is that Colin Roderick’s description, ‘literary sewage … a sex-ridden fantasy, doomed to oblivion’, was very much the opinion at the time of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, and I think people are still reading that. So I don’t think people will stop reading Ireland, unless of course a future Fascist government puts him on the Index Expurgatorius.
LikeLike
By: bikerpaul68 on December 19, 2023
at 9:04 pm
Ha ha, we should all be cautious when condemning a book to oblivion, eh?
LikeLike
By: Lisa Hill on December 19, 2023
at 11:09 pm