Ethnicity meets gender meets class in Australia

Feminism in Australia is a political movement and a published discourse. Its activities range from Equal Employment Opportunity practices in the public service to 'cultural' production in such forms as academic literature and documentary film-making. For most immigrant women of non-English speaking background, the cultural arena of feminism is foreign, in many more ways than one. Feminism represents, to speak perhaps too stereo typically, a middle class 'Anglo' culture, far removed from everyday experience. And this despite well-meaning concern on the part of many feminists for those groups suffering compound oppressions of class and ethnicity, as well as gender. Symbolically, an almost cult concern is shown for the plight of the migrant woman outworker, and with considerable real justification. Yet this concern is from a singular cultural perspective: middle class libertarian liberalism, quite alien to the immediate needs and aspirations of its subjects.