Take Talkin Up To The White Woman: Indigenous Women And Feminism Written By Aileen Moreton-Robinson Depicted In Digital Copy

great knowledge and should be essential reading, Would have givenstars, however the academic language makes this an inaccessible read for many, A mustread!!! Despite being publishedyears ago, the issues and concepts are very current, She covers a lot of essential concepts and Australian history that most white feminist circles still don't engage with.


The academic language makes it a bit hard to navigate at times, however I think that is appropriate since the text is aimed at middle class white feminist academics in Australia.
It's also aimed at middle class white women generally, and most of us have the privilege of access to universitylevel education making the book accessible to us.
As with Living on Stolen Land, I don't want to be the white woman talking about and appropriating an Indigenous woman's words.
So if you've been thinking about reading this book, do it! This review is intended to prod people into doing so, and in no way is a substitute for MoretonRobinson's own words.


I saw Aileen MoretonRobinson at the Broadside feminist festival last year and she was intriguing.
On the panel I saw, about women of colour and how they approach feminism, she was the oldest by perhaps a decade or more, and she seemed to get quite impatient by what some of the panellists were saying and how they were saying it she told them in a poor paraphrase that feminism is a white woman's thing and they, not being white, needed to think differently and maybe white feminism wasn't actually what they needed.
That's a very poor paraphrase, actually, but I think it gets some of the sense of what she said and for me, as a white feminist in the audience, it was eyeopening and kind of stunning.
I am in a weird halfway place I think between second and third wave feminism I don't think I think that all women are sisters and experience oppression in the same way, but I've definitely had to work on fully manifesting intersectionality in the way that I think and act.
The panellists too were intrigued by how MoretonRobinson spoke at one point someone only halfjokingly suggested the panel should be the rest of them asking MoretonRobinson questions.


The other thing that really stuck in my mind was the fact that this book was published in, and MoretonRobinson had never before been asked to speak at a conference in Australia about it.
Never. Nineteen years of a book that was the first Indigenous Australian interrogation of feminism, . . and conferences have ignored it, and her, That's a disgrace. There is, at least, ath anniversary edition out this year, and MoretonRobinson seems to have been on some programmes ABC Radio, The Drum, so that's a bit of an improvement

So, the book.
It took me quite a long time to read, partly because this year I have been struggling to read new stuff which I think is the case for many people and partly because it's been a while since I read any theory it's not every chapter, but several deal with anthropological theory and feminist theory so I knew I needed to read it slowly to actually absorb what was being said.
Rushing through would have been a disservice to the book, and I wouldn't have really appreciated everything being discussed.


Throughout the book MoretonRobinson talks about "the subject position middleclass white woman" which I found challenging, in some ways because as she points out, women like that/women like me are indeed accustomed to being the default.
And even when I am aware that I am those things, constantly having it pointed out like Indigenous women, like AfricanAmerican women, like.
. . etc usually experience is a novel experience, And an important one. And is one of the core points of the entire book: feminism especially as it was in the lates, in some corners I think it may have changed a bit in the last two decades has been developed by white women with themselves at the centre, and while we're busy interrogating various positions of power etc we forget to think about how, even in our gender oppression we massively benefit from and help to support racial oppression.


MoretonRobinson begins my talking about how Indigenous women have presented themselves in their lifewritings, pointing out the differences in those experiences compared to middleclass white women.
She then tackles a massive job in looking at how various feminists have theorised 'difference' and 'race' over time and in different places mostly white feminists, since they have been the most significant for Australian ways of thinking.
And along with a whole bunch of interesting things here the main takeaway for me is that white feminists haven't considered that they are white that they we have race/colour/ethnic position.
And then the third chapter was perhaps the most gutpunch, from a historical point of view: she gives an overview of how white feminist anthropologists have talked about "Indigenous women" and all the ways that has been part of the colonising process, which chapteralso continues to interrogate.


All of the preceding stuff is incredibly important and could have stood by itself.
What MoretonRobinson then does in chapteris present interviews with white feminist academics ask me how hard it's been to remember to put 'white' at the start of each nominal group.
. . hello privilege, about how those academics think about race and present it in their courses and interact with people from different ethnic backgrounds.
And this was illuminating and also for me challenging: who do I interact with and why, how do I present an antiracist stance in my teaching and also live it in the world, and so on.


Finally, the last chapter presents a history of how Indigenous women up to, which I think is important to remember, since more will have been done and said since then have challenged white women and their intentions and words.
Which was its own version of challenging mostly because of how white women have responded to being challenged often, badly.


This book won't be for everyone I know that reading theory isn't going to be appealing for many.
But the ideas and challenges that MoretonRobinson present are vital for us middleclass white women to hear and acknowledge.
If you ever get a chance to hear her, please do so, If you think you can cope with some theory, please get hold of this book and read it.
This book was wonderful. I have made a conscious effort to read more by Indigenous women and this does an excellent job of dissecting Australias feminist past and disrupting the notions of first and second wave feminists that womens sole oppression is on the basis of sex.
I came to realise that all of the feminist theory I had read had positioned race as other as an interlocking part of feminism but that all women had the same type of oppression and shared the same experiences.
Sexual freedom I. e sexuality, contraception, extra marital sex, wages for work, and escapism from the domestic sphere are all white concerns, and race is just added onto that rather than a completely different way of experiencing the world and being a woman.

I found the first three chapters a little hard to get through but I think that is because the main theses of white is never presented as a race and white people writing about indigenous women is not objective data.
Both of which I am very familiar with as they have come into dominant discourse in recent years as opposed toyears ago when the book was written which is wonderful! Its quite academic so its not as accessible as it could be, however, considering Indigenous women have constantly been positioned as less cerebral I didnt mind and personally I am in a position to read it.


Things I learned:
Freud used indigenous women as evidence of evolution positioning them between apes and white humans
the difference between slavery and indentured labour in Australia in thes was that the government not free enterprise, controlled the terms and conditions of the trade.

Indigenous women were not legally entitled to be paid award wages until thes but this money was handled by the manager of the reserve.

Radical feminists accept that there are both sex and gender differences between men and women.
Adrienne rich has argued that because men fear womens reproductive capacities they need to control womens bodies.
She asserts that motherhood as an institution underpins social and political systems, For her the normative form of motherhood is white motherhood, She states that motherhood has withheld over one half of the human species from the decisions affecting their lives it exonerates men from fatherhood in any authentic sense, it creates the dangerous schism between private and public life, it calcifies human choices and personalities.
Motherhood as an institution has made some classes of white women prisoners of their bodies, Radical feminists fail to take into account that for other women, such as Indigenous women in Australia, motherhood meant having their children forcibly removed from their care.

The work of Radha Kumar on feminism and identity politics in India reveals the degree to which Muslim culture has reinforced mens power over women by the use and construction of traditions that position as subservient and inferior.
These traditions she argues, are a manifestation of muslim mens need to assert their cultural dominance after British colonisation, rather than being orthodoxy.
Kumars work shows indirectly the legacy of white colonialism where whiteness shapes the lives of muslim men.
The invention of a tradition that did not exist prior to colonisation is a strategy to reclaim the colonised Muslim male self through the subjugation of muslim women.
Whiteness is salient in shaping the lives of people of colour through its ideological presence in former British colonies.

Indigenous women could not participate in first wave feminism because

they were not free, Their legal status as wards of the state empowered white protectors to circumscribe their movements, cultural practices, and behaviour.
The removal of Indigenous girls from their families and the subsequent compulsory exploitation of their labour as domestic servants became official policy in SA someyears after the firstwave of feminists campaigned for and won the right to vote.

White anthropologists divided indigenous womens experiences into a binary of traditional and contemporary, Traditional being their perception of indigenous culture pre colonialism and contemporary being their lives on stations and reserves.
However they did not acknowledge colonialisms role in changing their lives or forcefully shaping their family structures.

For Huggins, talking about rape as everyones business breaks indigenous law and the racial damage it does far outweighs the importance of gender.

As Behrendt argues, white feminism tells Indigenous women “that their position in society is defined by their gender rather than their race, that the push for rights by white women will empower black women, that we are aligned with white women in the battle against oppression and that white women are as oppressed as we are.
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The white feminist anthropologist authorised herself to speak on behalf of Indigenous women and this authority was contested by the selfpresentation of Indigenous women.
Bell and the white editors response to the Indigenous women was to represent them as inadequate academics and unauthentic Indigenous women, mediated through the dialectical triangulation of the middle class subject position white woman, feminist academic and traditional Indigenous woman.
They drew on the authority of white masculine modern foundationalist science and its discourse on radicalising “Other”, as a way of reinscribing the dominance of their subject position middleclass white woman in the debate.

feminist academics interaction with difference is a matter of choice not imperative: They live in a country where cities have been developed around invisible conveniences that give social preferences to whiteness in the location of municipal and other services.
The design of suburbs and the naming of streets have been planned to serve white neighbourhoods and preserve their whiteness The engagement with the “Other” remains predominantly, for these women, a dimension of their work practice their public world where their academic knowledges engage with difference to varying degree.
This reduces the opportunity for their experiential knowledges about the “Other” to be interrogated,
we must participate in a society not of our making under conditions not of our choosing.
Feminists exercise their white race privilege in the womens movement because issues of importance to Indigenous women such as the preservation of culture are not part of the political agenda for white women.

When white women were demanding abortions, indigenous women were fighting for stricter controls over contraception, having been coerced into receiving Depo shots illegal in Australia at the time by the state
To change the power relations between these two groups of women is more complex than giving voice, making space or being inclusive within a white feminist politics of difference.
The dominance of the subject position middleclass white woman diminishes the inclusiveness of a politics of difference in Australian feminism because it leaves whiteness uninterrogated, centred and invisible.
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