A Man’s Town: Inequality Between Women and Men in Rural Australia

“How could you call it anything but a man’s town; it’s made for them: what with all its sporting activities, pubs and clubs. While men play we’re often busy raising money to keep one of their clubs going?”

A Man’s Town, based on fieldwork spanning seventeen years in a rural community, wrestles with issues such as: Why are men able to exclude, subordinate and exploit women? How, despite the resentment and resistance of some women, do men preserve their advantage in all major spheres of daily life?

The gender system is one of the most powerful structures in this community. It draws much of its force from the hierarchical structures of the wider society and from an Australian culture which continues to declare the superiority of men and their activities and the inferiority of women and their activities. In this community men control the most valued resources, especially farming land, town businesses and executive positions in the paid workforce. They dominate political, community service, and recreational activities and they successfully delegate domestic tasks and Child care to women. Women should be at home… That’s where they belong. They can get their … needs met there.’ Yet, individually and collectively men appropriate much of the time and skill of women for their own leisure or to enhance their public status: I’m expected to send a casserole along to one of his club’s activities and I’m not even invited to attend.’ To maintain the gender system men’s activities are defined as economic and therefore superior, and women’s as non-economic. Each cultural message about men’s superiority simultaneously conveys a message about women’s inferiority: ‘If you want to have a worthwhile talk you have to talk with men. Women take decisions over spending a few dollars and we take them over spending hundreds of thousands.’

This is the first full length study in this country to offer a comprehensive account of gender inequality in all the major areas of people’s daily lives: the home, paid work, leisure pursuits, religion, community politics and voluntary organisational activities; and to illuminate the interconnections between women’s disadvantaged position in each of these spheres. An accessible and thought-provoking book, it should be of particular interest to students and teachers of anthropology, sociology, social work, women’s studies, and town and country planning. At the same time, because it deals with issues at the centre of all Australian women and men’s lives it will be of great interest to a wider audience.

It discusses various aspects of people’s lives, from work and recreation to family and community service, in a single social context–how women were held to disadvantaged positions in all spheres of their lives. Accessible and provocative, this work will interest scholars in gender studies, sociology, and family and community studies, as well as those involved in community planning.