Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia

by Anne Summers

Sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape had not been named, although they certainly existed, when Damned Whores and God’s Police was first published in 1975. That was before the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 and before large numbers of women became visible in employment, in politics and elsewhere across society. It was in this climate that Anne Summers identified ‘damned whores’ and ‘God’s police’, the stereotypes that characterized all women as being either virtuous mothers whose function was to civilize society or bad girls who refused, or were unable, to conform to that norm and who were thus spurned and rejected. These stereotypes persist to this day, argues Anne Summers in this updated version of her classic book.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Australia, Politics, Sociology, Womens

494 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Professional

Dr Anne Summers AO is a best-selling author, journalist and thought-leader with a long career in politics, the media, business and the non-government sector in Australia, Europe and the United States.

She is author of eight books, including the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police, first published in 1975. This bestseller was updated in 1994 and, again, in 2002 and stayed continuously in print until 2008. A new edition was published on International Women’s Day 2016.

Her previous books are The Misogyny Factor (2013), The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love (2009, 2010) and On Luck (2009), The End of Equality (2003), Ducks on the Pond (1999), Gamble for Power (1983) and Her-Story: Australian Women in Print (with Margaret Bettison – 1980). She writes a regular opinion column for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Anne was involved in the early 1970s, in helping start Elsie, Australia’s first women’s refuge and Refractory Girl, a women’s studies journal.

In 1975 she became a journalist, first on The National Times, then in 1979 was appointed Canberra bureau chief for the Australian Financial Review and then the paper’s North American editor.

She ran the federal Office of the Status of Women (now Office for Women) from 1983 to 1986 when Bob Hawke was Prime Minister and was an advisor, on women’s issues among other things, to Prime Minister Paul Keating for a year prior to the 1993 federal election.

In 1987 in New York she was editor-in-chief of Ms. – America’s landmark feminist magazine – and the following year, with business partner Sandra Yates bought Ms. and Sassy magazines in the second only women-led management buyout in US corporate history.

In November 2012 she began publishing Anne Summers Reports a lavish free digital magazine that promises to be ‘Sane Factual Relevant’ and which reports on politics, social issues, art, architecture and other subjects not covered adequately by the mainstream media.

In September 2013 Anne launched her series of Anne Summers Conversations events with former prime minister Julia Gillard in front of a packed Sydney Opera House.

Anne was chair of the board of Greenpeace International (2000-2006) and Deputy President of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum (1999-2008).

In 1989 she was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for her services to journalism and to women. In 2011, along with three other women, Anne was honoured as an Australian Legend with her image placed on a postage stamp.

Anne was a leader of the generation and the movement that changed Australia for women. Her involvement in the women’s movement has earned her community respect.  She has received Honorary Doctorates from Flinders University (1994), the University of New South Wales (2000), the University of South Australia (2014) and the University of Adelaide (2015).

Personal
Anne lives in Sydney with Chip Rolley, her partner of 27 years who is the editor of The Drum, the ABC’s opinion website.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Damned Whores and God’s Police was first published in 1975, I was in my first year at university, and just about every young woman I knew raved about it. But it wasn’t until several years later, when Anne Summers’ groundbreaking work was prescribed reading for a post-graduate unit on Australian political culture, that I read the book and realised what all the fuss was about. Summers skillfully captured Australia’s unique and troubled attitude towards women, tracing it back to our colonial beginnings.

Re-reading the book over 30 years later, at a time when Australia’s treatment of juvenile offenders in the Northern Territory and “offshore detainees” in Manus Island and Nauru are dominating the headlines, was an unsettling experience. It seems that we haven’t left our convict origins very far behind.

The title Damned Whores and God’s Police is drawn from women’s prescribed roles in the early days of white settlement. Before 1840, “female convicts and female immigrants were expected to be, and were treated as, whores, and this label was applied indiscriminately to virtually all women in the colony”. During the 1840s and 1850s, when the idea of a bourgeois family took hold, women were expected to become “God’s Police”, “entrusted with the moral guardianship of society”. Summers adds that while moral policing “has been the lot of women in most Western societies, in Australia it has acquired an almost evangelical cast and many of its particularities have given it a unique form”.

A bestseller when it was first published, Damned Whores and God’s Police has remained almost continuously in print since then. The 2014 edition incorporates all of the material from previous editions: the original 1975 text; the revised 1994 edition, for which Summers was awarded a PhD from the University of Sydney; and a new introduction and afterword.

In her introduction to the 1994 edition, Summers explains why she chose to add to, rather than rewrite and update, her original work:

“If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them.”

I enjoyed Summers’ personal introduction, drawing on her experiences on the front lines of feminism in both Australia and the United States. From her perspective as the former editor of Ms magazine, Summers explains why US feminists have not had the enduring effect on public policy as their Australian sisters: “The American women’s movement is no different from American society in general in its obsession with fame and celebrity”. This “national fetish” has led the US women’s movement to surrender “much of their political agenda to the fads of the famous”.

In practice, this has meant that:

“… the women’s movement has become captive to the ideological whims of the celebrities who, in turn, usually only have strong (public, at least) feelings about issues involving personal lifestyle choices such as abortion. It is almost unheard of to have famous names lending their support on economic issues — they are too complicated, too difficult — and maybe this is why these subjects are so neglected by American feminism. Yet it is issues like equal pay and job opportunities that affect the daily lives of most women and are of more immediate, urgent and continuing relevance than the more fashionable subjects Hollywood stars feel strongly about.”

Underlying the political, social and legal advances women have made over the past 40 years is the need for a fundamental rethink of the way social institutions are structured. As Summers points out: “The work-place is still mostly organized around employment patterns developed earlier this century when the work-force was overwhelmingly male (with the assumption that each male worker had a domestic support system in the form of a wife).” Likewise, school hours, “seem to be still arranged around the assumption that women are full-time housewives and mothers able to be home in mid-afternoon when children get out of school”.

The introduction provides a brief overview of the advances Australian women have made over the past four decades. Summers concludes by musing on the relevance today of her title “damned whores and God’s police” — “So while we can argue that the stereotypes are still there, submerged in the national consciousness, they are not as coercive as they once were.”

Not surprisingly, other aspects of the book have lost much of their currency. For example, Summers notes of Chapter 5, “The Poverty of Dependence”, “When this book was written it seemed important to try to have something to say on the relationship between sex oppression and capitalism; not even the most ardent Marxist would probably bother to do so today and I certainly have lost interest in this once-pressing subject.” Thankfully, Chapter 4, “The Ravaged Self”, which explores territory similar to Betty Friedan’s landmark 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, on the psychic damage and resulting emotional problems women may experience from limited opportunities to work outside the home, is now very outdated.

Similarly, much of Chapter 7, “The Colonisation of Sex”, which covers socialisation, and sexual and medical issues, is now outdated, although the section on the construction of femininity still rings true: “It is not something women are born with, but is posed as something they must strive for.”

The remainder of this review focuses on aspects of the original text which I found interesting and relevant today.

I enjoyed Summers’ analysis of the effect of Australian cultural identity on colonial literature, especially the “Australian Man of the Bush, that brash, rugged, sardonic individual”, who lives on to this day in the popular imagination. She adds, “Probably more written words have been devoted to creating, and then to analysing and extolling, this composite Australian male than to any other single facet of Australian life.”

She contrasts this with early women writers, such as Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Mary Gilmore and Henrietta Drake-Brockman, who wrote about the bush. Their female characters were “copers, responding to settings that most of them had neither chosen nor enjoyed, and as such their stories were chronicles of reaction.” This meant that:

“Women in the bush could be strong characters but they were not allowed, in the literature as in life, to rival their husband’s monopolization of the national characteristics.”

Summers’ original take on Australians’ fond depiction of their nation as “Godzone Country” was that it is really “Manzone Country” — in other words, women’s contribution to the Australian experience is largely invisible — has held up surprisingly well. As she notes in the introduction to the 1994 edition:

“While Australian culture is not the thoroughly masculine construct that prevailed in the mid-1970s, it is still true in the early 1990s that women’s views and presence are under-represented. We are still coming to terms as a society and as a nation with how to reconcile our various parts into a fair and coherent whole. The debate includes such issues as Aboriginal reconciliation, multiculturalism, reconciling work and family responsibilities… and how to conduct ourselves as a largely European nation on the cusp of Asia. It does not yet adequately address what should perhaps be the most fundamental question of all: achieving reconciliation between women and men.”

Summers’ critique of marriage as an unequal partnership which women enter into largely through economic necessity seems extremely outdated today. But her description of the emotional work expected of a wife and mother is still current:

“She consoles the child who is bullied at school, the husband who has problems at work, the daughter who is in the throes of a teenage passion, the son who didn’t make the football team. The woman alleviates stress between family members and thus enables them to keep going at whatever work they are engaged in outside the home, and to the extent that she is successful in keeping them going they value ‘the family’. The institution itself is credited with the individual work of one of its members.”

In the second part of the book, Summers provides an incredibly detailed history of Australia, focusing on women and the pervasive stereotypes of “damned whores” and “God’s police”.

Contemporary accounts of the attitudes towards and treatment of women — convicts and free immigrants alike — in the early days of the penal settlement make extremely grim reading. Women were subject to “enforced whoredom”, a condition which had far-reaching effects on the female populace.

When transportation to the mainland ceased in the 1840s, Australia evolved from a penal colony to a respectable society, and women were required to fill a new role: the fledgling nation needed wives, not whores. The work of Caroline Chisholm and other private individuals to encourage the immigration and settlement of thousands of families and single people, and emerging ideas about the importance of family life, ushered in a new view of women as “God’s Police”. But this too, limited women’s options. As Summers points out:

“Caroline Chisholm had thought that the mere presence of large numbers of women would be sufficient to alter the mores of convict Australia; she was confident that what she considered to be women’s innate desires for marriage, children and homes would, if encouraged by the authorities, secure a reversal of the Damned Whore stereotype. What she did not see was that the God’s Police stereotype was just as much an imposition on women as the one it replaced.”

The ideology of God’s Police has had a far-reaching influence on Australia’s national character. It was behind the tradition of wowserism which began in the early 20th Century, when a “rampant puritanism descended upon Australian society”. It also influenced the women’s suffrage movement. As Summers writes, the early feminists:

“fought for the dignity of womanhood but their ideal of womanhood was one which still depended heavily on the Victorian characterization of women as pure and noble, as superior to men and as needing special protection. There was a contradiction between this characterization and the ideal of independence and self-determination they sought.”

The last chapter, “Suburban Neurotics”, brings the reader up to date with the then-contemporary second-wave feminism of the 1970s. Back then, although nearly 30 per cent of women with children under 12 years old were in the paid workforce, many of them experienced guilt and anxiety due to the enduring ideology of God’s Police:

“It is still present in the publicly articulated policies of the churches and many political groups. It is present in the themes and assumptions of advertising directed towards women. It is present in the content of most women’s magazines. And it is present in the theories of psychologists (and child psychologists), sociologists and many others who are either studying women or who have set themselves up to ‘help’ them.”

Extensively researched and footnoted, Damned Whores and God’s Police is essential reading for anyone interested in Australia’s cultural history, and the history of our feminist movement. And if any of today’s readers doubt the need for a feminist movement, they should read Summers’ moving 1994 afterword, “Letter to the Next Generation”:

“If you contrast your life today with the description of how life used to be, you will have some idea of what we have won — and what you must never lose.”

[Aphie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a middle-class white feminist problem. Ms Summers talked about how women 'don't have to be tied to child-rearing' but place the children in daycare centres... (WHO ARE APPARENTLY STAFFED BY UNGENDERED GHOSTS??!!)
Since having my son and then entering the profession I am always so utterly flabbergasted and enraged by MiddleClass White Mummies who seem to just overlook that the majority of people (STILL) who care for their children are women... and more often than not women who are not white, at that.


Also, am now feeling totally pissed that Caroline Chisholm was removed from our five dollar note, and also pissed that we never learned much about her at school.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a feminist. How can I have not read this seminal book until now!?! Yes, the world has changed much since it was written, and yes, the perspective is largely a middle-class one, but Summers’ arguments on the dualism of the stereotypes of women and her account of history of women in Australia should be read by all, especially young women who say they are not feminists.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst this is a well written and thoroughly researched book (which I appreciate) I strongly disagree with much of what the author has to say. I found myself repeatedly reminding myself of the time in which the book was written. Nevertheless, I appreciate the recommendation to read it, and I'm glad I devoted the time to it.

[Lia Perkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am just glad I finally finished this book! I find the Damned Whore/God’s Police historical idea compelling and there were some banger lines about this. However, reading this was a chore and the ‘colonisation of women’ is a futile analogy and represents some of the bizarre theorising of the book.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every person who wants to understand why feminism is so important needs to read this. Examining the often dichotomous nature of women's lives and the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't binary of choices for them, Anne Summers uses the so-called 'birth of a nation' to explore how this position turned women into their own worst enemies.

There is an obvious absence of native women's voices and those of minority migrant communities but as a historical understanding of the position of women who arrived at the smallest continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth century from what they had thought was a hostile and inhospitable Great Britain, this is a well-researched and ultimately eye-opening account of the misogyny that founded the loneliest colony on earth.

[Karen Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book now a bit old but sadly STILL relevant regarding cultural stereotypes towards women in the West. Damned whores refer to those women who break stereotypes and dont play by the rules and Gods police refers to the more stereotypically programmed women who POLICE the infringements on the status quo. Whilst Feminism often recounts narratives of male originators of sexism, this book details some of the issues relating to female to female sexism. Its probably something every go getting woman has experienced at some time disapproval from the sisterhood or blatant betrayal.....interesting to add into a socio cultural understanding of our culture and its persisting prejudice.

[Stephanie]

Lest anyone fear for my moral decay, I'm interested in reading this because it was quoted in a Bruce C. Hafen speech to the world Congress on families. He cited it as an example of the moral force of women.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book comparing what Anne Summers believes to be Damned Whores and God's Police. Helpful in learning about feminist historians and what other peoples views are from the past. Sure you could read the intro, but puts the history of women in Australian history into perspective.

[Jennifer Rolfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this when it first came out and it was such a relief at the time to have this. I didn't feel so alone in my appraisal of society at the time.

[ivana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read the introduction.

Interesting to provide a backdrop for culture and values.

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent essay on the roles assigned to early Australian female settlers and the social contradictions arising. Terrific.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only reviewed the (quite long) introduction to the new edition. See https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/03/08/d...

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slog to get through, I couldn’t decide whether to give 2 or 3 stars but I’ve learnt towards 3 due to its importance as a book.

This book is fascinating, important and extremely admirable as an endeavour. I also really like the lens which Summers framed it through the titles dichotomy which gave an analytic theory to accompany the more report-style summary of women’s oppression.

However there were numerous occasions the book just didn’t fully grab me, although I’m very aware that the book isn’t necessarily for me (but this is the only perspective I know and can take).

Several chapters seriously lacked referencing. Although listing sources at the end of each chapter was admirable, if you actually go through the content you will find statement after statement making a claim with no evidence supporting it. Further, there were several times Summers used language that delegitimised her work and leant more into a political pamphlet, such as one part when it was something like “in …. It was at this much per week, by ….. it was at this much per year, a huge rise”. Using two different duration references like this greatly exaggerate the growth and weaken the extent I found the work reliable. I also feel that it just tried to do too much. It’s admirable to try and write a widely encompassing analysis of a very large topic but the way it jumped between dozens of different topics meant that it was often confusing or draining for the reader and that it was inevitable for there to be times Summers would be writing on something that wasn’t her strongest area of expertise. It also just made it quite a slow slog to read as it is a very large book with dense material, which doesn’t make the book worse by any means just naturally far less engaging to read.

Then you also have the inherent weaknesses of the book’s age and era. Although Summers did recognise that race was important and racism rampant, the terminology used, ‘blacks’, was uncomfortable to read in 2025. This acknowledgement of racism in Australian society and being a factor for Aboriginal women also never seemed to make Summers consider actually analysing the lives of Aboriginal women and other non-European groups of women in Australia such as Chinese women. It was merely only ever a footnote in an introduction or a conclusion, one of the very things Summers was accusing Australian writers of doing to white women in their books.

Important and interesting, but not one I’m likely to put on a ‘my favourite books’ list and one that i was glad to finish when I did.

[Tilda · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's clear why this book was so groundbreaking when first published, as really the first attempt to try to explain the experience of Australian women. This edition had all the various introductions from the reissuing publications over the year, which resulted in a pretty daunting tome! Summers has a razor-sharp writing style with plenty of passages to underline. Unsurprisingly, it has dated in parts and is overwhelmingly centred in white, cis, hetero women's experiences but in that, it does a good job. Interesting to reflect on how much has changed and how much has stayed very much the same.

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although outdated in some areas, still very pertinent to todays society.

[Hugh]

dnf

[eva!! · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love this??!!! loved every moment of it ty anne summers