Page 22 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

Communal housing and

women’s liberation: A

forgotten history

Molly Mckew recalls the role that communal living played in radically challenging
the role of women in Australia in the 1970s

Molly Mckew, Melbourne, Australia; The Conversation

The 1970s was a decade of political agitation, when activism won women a range of legal and cultural
freedoms, from no-fault divorce to work rights to escaping the “ladies’ lounge” in pubs. One little
acknowledged aspect of feminist history at this time is the demographic and cultural shift that led to a
new way of living: the share house.

For the first time, women could live independently of families or husbands, and find support networks
outside the nuclear family model. In these experimental living arrangements, typically located in inner
urban suburbs, women were free to become activists, creatives, hedonists and intellectuals.

Before this time, women had usually gone from the family home to homemaking with a male partner.
Even if studying or working part-time, they generally lived temporarily with a relative, an older, trusted
family friend, or a landlady.

In my interviews with women who lived in share houses in Melbourne and Sydney from the late 1960s to
the late 1970s, most described these as places of freedom from the expectations of one’s upbringing –
particularly gendered ones.

“It was as if parents didn’t exist,” said Amanda, an artist. “I could be whoever I want to be. I could do
whatever I want, and my art could be what I wanted.”

Many of my interviewees spoke of disillusionment with their suburban upbringing. It represented
conformity, a predictable life trajectory and narrow-mindedness, and was often viewed as a place of
entrapment and confining gender relations.

In a 1974 edition of the countercultural magazine The Living Daylights, for instance, “Trapped” of
Wodonga begged readers for advice on escaping a marriage where she was “checkmated by the rules
of this life into a state of living death”. She spent her days awaiting her husband’s return home, when he
would use her as a “corpse to masturbate into”.

In a 1974 edition of the Melbourne University newspaper Farrago, a woman named Leanne observed
that: “to me, the way people live is political. What most people see as a ‘natural’ way to live, in a family …
is in fact, a value judgement imposed by a dominant middle-class culture and ideology.”

Talking to me, 40 years later, Leanne reflected that communal share houses were “very conscious efforts
to take responsibility for children in a kibbutz-style way, sharing childcare, domestic labour, freeing up
the women to live their own independent lives.”

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