‘Good family unit’ seen as slavery

Press, 1 July 1985, Page 9

‘Good family unit’ seen as slavery

PA Hamilton Fundamentalist Christian groups promoting a “good family unit” are advocating a return to female slavery, says a Women’s Electoral Lobby spokeswoman. The W.E.L. national coordinator, Ms Dorothy Wilson, in an address to W.E.L.’s twentieth annual national conference on Saturday, said the backlash from anti-women groups was one of the biggest challenges facing feminists. “The more they are threatened, the more insidious are their tactics,” she said. Fundamentalist use of the term “good family unit” needed to be questioned. “What they are actually talking about is almost always a paternalistic unit, where the father dominates,” Ms Wilson said. “He is the undisputed head of the family and the wife stays firmly in the kitchen, head in the nappy bucket were she belongs. Her duty is to serve. Her task is to train her daugh-

ters to serve, her sons to lead. “If she is driven out to work through economic necessity she still runs thehousehold. We are back to female slavery. “One significant feature is that many people who hold up this vision of family life belong to fundamentalist religious groups — maledominated and organised. “They are fighting as fiercely as they can preserve male power,” Ms Wilson said. The people who fought ratification of the United Nations convention on Women, who were fighting against sex education in schools, and who wanted to stamp out homosexuality were anti-women an antifamily, she said. “A good healthy family unit is one where one figure does not rule as of right. The healthy family is one where individual members each play a part, co-opera-tively, each according to particular talents or

strengths,” Ms Wilson said. “The family can never be healthy if women are oppressed.” Another irony was their opposition to homosexuals and lesbians. “Homosexuals and lesbians are seen as a threat to the family, yet they are part of family groups. How much more heartbreaking to family life can it be to have one’s homosexual child thrown into jail, vilified and spoken of as evil or disgusting?” In spite of the reaction of the anti-women lobby only a small degree of progress had been made for women during the United Nations Decade for Women, Ms Wilson said. However, the more that power changed hands the stronger the backlash would be. “It is time to show some anger against those who pretend to care about women yet spend thousands of dollars in attempting to subdue them,” she said.