Anne Fairhurst Summers, the Australian who in January became the editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine, views the world through bright red-rimmed glasses. It`s a modern look in keeping with the changes she has instituted at Ms., drawing reader letters of both praise and ire. The 480,000-circulation magazine has changed hands three times in the last year, passing from the Ms. Foundation to John Fairfax Ltd. of Australia to former Fairfax executives Sandra Yates and Summers, who engineered a buyout. In this interview with writer Darlene Gavron, Summers, 43, describes her feminist awakening, and how it helped shape her vision for Ms.
I have never set a goal for myself. I know this is a terrible thing to say, and not what role models are supposed to say, but I haven`t. I`ve changed careers several times, from being a housewife to a student to a journalist to a bureaucrat, a writer, a foreign correspondent, to editor of a major magazine. I love the idea of constantly being challenged by new things. That might sound like a bit of a cliche, but I really mean it.
As a child growing up in a fairly dreary suburb of a small Australian city, my secret dream was to escape and to lead a life in which I was never bored, and would be able to do interesting, exciting things. That was achieved with bells on.
I was brought up in a very traditional Catholic family near Adelaide in Australia. I was the only girl and the oldest of five. I left (secondary)
school with the sense that what I had been brought up to do, which was probably to be the Catholic mother of six, wasn`t what I wanted to do.
The main thing I wanted was some independence, so I moved out and spent three years out in the world, doing all sorts of basically lowly jobs; I worked in shops, offices and all that sort of stuff, and traveled a lot within Australia. I became a bit dissatisfied, and decided there probably was more I could do.
I got a job in the library of the University of Adelaide as a junior librarian, filing cards and cataloging books, and I decided to reapply for a scholarship I had been awarded and enroll. I was about 20.
I got married in my second year at university. Summers is my married name. It never occurred to me to keep my own name. I didn`t think that was an issue.
A short time later we went to live in the outback of Australia, where my husband (John) had a job working on an aboriginal reserve. It was a very remote place. We had no telephone, no communication with the outside world at all, except the mail plane that came once a week. I remember receiving a magazine that had in it a long article called ”Woman: the Longest
Revolution” by Juliet Mitchell, a British writer. She was arguing that although women had accomplished a lot, there were still areas in which we had not made it, such as education and reproductive freedom.
I realized that my education hadn`t been nearly as good as it could or should have been, that I had been allowed to leave school too early, or not do subjects I thought were boring or too hard. Clearly these ideas were churning around in my head.
And although I wasn`t unhappy, I guess I asked the question, ”Is this all there is?” I didn`t have a good job; I was a housewife; I didn`t have kids, didn`t want any yet. I really felt the whole world was exploding around me, and all this great political stuff was going on. And here was I being a bored housewife. I thought, ”This is crazy.”
I was 25 when I left my husband in 1970. We are technically married, because we`ve never gotten divorced. But we`ve been separated for far, far longer than we were ever married. I was the first person I knew to break up a marriage.
For me (leaving) was the hardest thing I ever did. In some ways I think it would have been great if we could have worked it out. I wondered, why couldn`t we have grown together and done all these things together? But clearly, we couldn`t. And I`m sure that if I hadn`t been able to take my heart into my hands and tell him and everybody else and actually, physically leave, then I would never have written a book or left Adelaide or done any of the things that have happened since. I would have slipped into suburban life; I would have had a baby and another one. My whole life would have been different.
I don`t think it`s realistic that we`d get back together, but we both have this sort of funny thing in not totally wanting to let go. He had a child with another woman years ago. The child is now 15, and he and the other woman no longer have anything to do with each other, but when they were living together and she got pregnant, I said, ”Well, of course, we must get divorced.” He said, ”Us? No.”
I went back to live in Adelaide in 1968. Shortly after, we started getting the first articles and ideas trickling through from the United States, very early stirrings of the women`s movement, and we all became very excited. Good friends and I got back together at Adelaide University, and we organized the first women`s liberation meeting in 1969. At first we were very dependent on American ideas, but it didn`t take long before we started developing our own issues. And we started trying to apply our understanding about why Australian women were the way we were (in relation) to our particular past.
This eventually led to my writing a book, ”Damned Whores and God`s Police” (not available in the United States), which presented how Australian history had shaped the way women were in 1975, when the book was published.
”Damned whores” was the term used to describe female convicts: women who were sent involuntarily from England to Australia, usually for very petty crimes, because English jails were overflowing.
”God`s police” is a phrase coined by a very famous woman in Australian history, Caroline Chisholm, who thought the only way to civilize society was to use women as moral police of behavior.I got a doctorate for the book many years later.
I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile all those hours in the library researching the book with all that excitement and activism going on out here. So I got involved in starting Australia`s first women`s refuge and first rape crisis center at the same time I was writing my book.
I think I`m very lucky to have been at that age in those times. It was a really exciting time, a time of expanding intellectual horizons for women, which were followed by opportunities in the real world. I wouldn`t change anything about that time.
After the book was published, I became a newspaper feature writer, reporter and investigative journalist for the National Times. I came to America in 1978 to attend the World Press Institute program for foreign journalists in St. Paul, Minn. Five months later I went back to Australia to become the chief political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review, which is our daily business newspaper. I took to political reporting like a duck to water.
Before I went to university, I knew nothing about politics, not even what the parliament was, because I came from a family where politics wasn`t really discussed. But as soon as I got to university, politics became my major, and I became very active in the anti-Vietnam movement and the women`s movement.
In 1983, after Bob Hawke (a Labor party candidate) became prime minister, I was given the job of running the Office of the Status of Women. I devised a pilot program, where we got 28 of Australia`s largest companies to introduce affirmative action on a voluntary basis for 12 months to show that helping women realize their potential in the workforce was good for companies and the economy. We used the pilot program as a basis for legislation passed in 1986. In March of that year I came to New York to become foreign correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. When I announced I was leaving my job in the government to come to the U.S., all the people I knew thought I was insane, literally insane. My job was a permanent appointment, and I could have sat there and just coasted.
I found my first year in New York to be very tough, and I realized it was because I had expected it to be so easy. I had visited here many times and I thought I knew America backwards and forwards. But living here, and, you know, having to get your electricity connected and do your shopping and find the dry cleaner-that was quite different.
The company I worked for, John Fairfax Ltd., is a large media group that owns newspapers, magazines and television networks. I ran their newspaper bureau in New York. In June last year, they decided, with a lot of persuasion from Sandra Yates (president of Fairfax U.S.), to launch Sassy, an American version of a teenage magazine called Dolly that they run very successfully in Australia. Then last August Sandra found out Ms. was for sale.
I remember hearing about Ms. when it first came out. We were very excited, certainly about the idea of having a commercial magazine that had a feminist point of view and its message was wonderful. We were also quite surprised about some things to do with Ms., something that I find very amusing to look back on now. We were quite shocked by all the ads for cosmetics and things in this feminist magazine. I certainly don`t think that anymore.
I subscribed when I came to live here in 1986 and I thought I had moved on and women had moved on and the magazine`s feminist agenda was maybe a little bit stuck in the past. So when I suddenly found myself at Ms. as editor in chief, I already had some views as a reader.
I think the change I`m most proud of is the introduction of news and politics. I was told, ”You can`t do it; women aren`t interested in politics.” I don`t think so. I think it`s a matter of how you present the topic, how you relate politics to what`s relevant in women`s lives.
I`m still trying to understand why American women aren`t using their political clout. I wish I knew. I think one of the reasons might be there is disagreement about political goals. Some say abortion should be the main issue, others the ERA. There was never that consensus developed that women could rally behind and say, ”We think this.”
The Australian women`s movement had a lot more political success than here. We were either luckier or smarter, and it`s easier to do things in Australia because it`s small. Women in Australia got used to the fact the government owed us, that we had political clout and were going to use it. We never lost our political momentum and we`ve been working within the system and getting results since 1972.
I really believe there are enough American women out there who do care about politics, or who are willing to be made to care if they can see something in it for them. Political reporting is a very important avenue of growth for us.
Today women are finding that it`s very hard to juggle all their roles. I think ”having it all” is a kind of smug and almost cynical expression. I understand its history, and that it started as a very positive thing. Why should women have to give up one to have the other? Then ”having it all”
became this almost heartless thing. If you`re a good enough manager, you can have a great job, the perfect husband, best children, do exercise, cook gourmet meals, be a cosmopolitan lover and still have time for reflecting about your life. And if you feel stressed, well here`s an article on 20 ways to manage stress. That`s sort of a very uncaring and unrealistic attitude.
For women to have it all, it`s not just women who have to change. The world has to change. If women are going to continue to make as important a contribution to the economy as they are, they have to have support; they have to have ways of minding children so they don`t have to spend their entire working day driven by guilt or anxiety about where their kids are. We have to have policies that reflect reality.
But I don`t feel optimistic. I think that we still haven`t really gotten through to the politicians, particularly those running for president, that this is serious, that this is not some game, that having some cosmetic policy isn`t going to attract the women`s vote. (A candidate has) got to show he really understands women`s problems.
