The final chapter of the first edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police, published in 1975, begins with a question: ‘is there a possibility of liberation for women in Australia?’ The final chapter of the most recent edition of the work, published in 2016, closes with an acknowledgement of change, but warns that ‘the battles are not all won … the really hard part still lies ahead of us.’

Fifty years after its first publication, Damned Whores and God’s Police remains Australia’s best-known feminist book, written by Anne Summers, Australia’s best-known feminist. Examining the reception of Damned Whores and God’s Police since 1975 shows how it has served as a bellwether for the health of Australian feminism.

Damned Whores and God’s Police was not only a work of history, it drew on (white) women’s historical experiences for its central thesis. Summers argued that the colonisation of Australia had created a patriarchal gender order that reduced nineteenth-century women to one of two narrow roles: virtuous wives and mothers, dubbed “God’s police”, and the transgressive “damned whores”.

The dichotomy of the book’s title has proven a remarkably durable one, even as the metaphor of colonisation had the unfortunate effect of sidelining the experiences of First Nations women. But even considering these limitations, the book remains a remarkable feat of research, even more so when you consider the extent of Summers’ activism at the time she was writing it. (She was part of the collective who established Elsie women’s refuge in 1974, which also included femocrat and historian Lyndall Ryan).

Summers has worked tenaciously to keep Damned Whores and God’s Police in the public eye for fifty years. The book has been updated and republished three times: in 1994, 2002, and 2016 (and now appearing with a ‘50 years’ sticker). It has reportedly sold more than 100 000 copies.

Damned Whores and God’s Police was recognised as ground-breaking when it was published. Historian Ann-Mari Jordens in Labour History argued that it ‘presented a picture of Australian society and culture […] in which Australian women for the first time are visible.’  The women’s movement, while far from universal in their praise, clearly felt validated by Summers’ analysis. In Melbourne feminist paper Vashti’s Voice in 1976, Kathie described it as the book ‘that women’s liberation in Australia has desperately needed and waited for’ (p. 10). At the end of International Women’s Year, which had been both galvanising and bruising for the women’s movement in Australia, Summers’ book was read as proof that Australian women’s liberation had come of age.

Some questioned Summers’ radical feminist approach: Michael Cannon, writing in The Age in 1975, accused her of ‘bending the truth’ at times. Thelma Hunter in the Canberra Times said the book ‘overstated’ its feminist case. Yet John Douglas Pringle, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, admitted that Summers’ central contention – that ‘Australian women are still very much second-class citizens’ – was true, even though he noted that ‘men who suffer from high blood pressure should avoid [the book].’ His review took the title ‘Monstrous Regiment of Men’, twisting John Knox’s misogynist slogan. Tess Lawrence in the West Australian called Damned Whores a ‘lethal document destined to grow into a hydra-headed monster – powerful ammunition against anti-liberationists’ (15 November 1975, p. 29).

By the early 1990s, it was clear that the influence of this ‘lethal document’ had grown: not only was Damned Whores widely read in universities, it inspired a rich historiography of Australian convict women and of national identity. Summers, too, had taken her expertise into new realms. Summers headed the Office of the Status of Women from 1983 to 1986, and was an adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating on women’s issues to in the lead-up to the 1993 election, before becoming editor of Good Weekend magazine in 1994.

No longer a radical activist, Summers was now moving between the media and the federal bureaucracy. She told the Australian Women’s Weekly in December 1984 that ‘when you’re younger you can be more the agitator. And when you get older you have to take on the responsibility of trying to make things work’ (p. 7).

This was one of the lessons she sought to impart in the incendiary ‘letter to the next generation’, published in the second edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police in 1994. Addressed to the ‘women who were born after 1968, to you who are the daughters of the feminist revolution,’ she used generational language to not only recount a history of feminism, but to shape the way its story was told.

The second edition set out to defend the record and legacy of the second wave. It also demanded fealty from younger women, reminding them that ‘we will not always be there to fight for the things you need. You are the ones who will have to remain vigilant.’ Historian Joy Damousi, reviewing the updated book for The Age on 9 April 1994, pointed out that Summers offered little in new directions; rather, she simply chided young women ‘for not easily fitting into her view of what feminism is or should be’. The 2002 edition reinforced the letter’s message, with a timeline of ‘achievements by and for Australian women’, which emphasised the productive nature of the alliance between feminism and the state in Australia.

By 2016, generationalism no longer defined Australian feminism. There was, however, widespread anger at the misogyny that had been directed at Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Summers was the first to apply a feminist lens to analyse the abuse of Gillard in her 2014 public address, ‘Her rights at work’ (which anticipated the explosion of #MeToo a few years later) and she helped Gillard rehabilitate her feminist reputation after her departure from politics.

Summers capitalised on the feminist resurgence in the third edition of her book. The 2016 edition – an acid green, doorstopper of a book – exuded seventies cool (the Carol Jerrems 1975 portrait of Summers on the cover now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery). The book’s reputation was burnished by Summers’ decades of feminist advocacy. It is rare for a book in its fourth edition to include material from all previous iterations, as this one did, but we can be grateful for it, because it allowed readers to see the way the work – and Summers’ relationship to her readers and audiences – evolved over time.

This year, the Sydney Writers’ Festival held two sell-out sessions to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Damned Whores and God’s Police, packed with adoring and respectful crowds. Summers’ message to today’s audiences was not that far removed from her message in 1975: that the family oppresses women, economic independence is crucial, and family violence is a scourge. Fifty years ago, that was a galvanising, radical platform, but buttressed by historical research, it took flight, and it remains as true today as it was back then. Damned Whores and Gods’ Police is still a remarkable monument to the Australian women’s movement, and to Summers’ role in it. It will continue to be discovered, and rediscovered, by generations of Australian women.

I first read Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police for a third-year history honours seminar on Australian Women’s History, taught by historian Penny Russell. My major essay for that class was on Damned Whores, which I analysed alongside Beverley Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann (1975) and The Real Matilda by Miriam Dixson (1976), the latter best-known for its claim that Australian women were ‘the doormats of the Western world’. This trio of books and authors – sometimes a quartet if Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, 1788–1974 by Edna Ryan and Ann Conlon (1975) is included – are widely recognised as launching women’s and feminist history in Australia. I was thrilled to receive my highest ever mark to date and switched allegiances from English to major in History.

This was the mid-1990s, and I learned that there were numerous ‘Anne Summers’, who nevertheless all happened to be the same person. In addition to authoring one of the first feminist histories to be published in Australia, she was a co-founder of Elsie, the first feminist refuge; a femocrat and ‘public feminist’; and a journalist and publisher who took over Ms. and Sassy magazines.

My next encounter with Damned Whores was almost twenty years later when I re-read slabs of it for a 2013 article on ‘Women’s Writing and Feminism’ in the journal Outskirts. For that research, I ploughed through the literary pages of numerous Women’s Liberation publications. I was reminded, first of all, that the initial publication of Damned Whores was a very big deal, and next, that the book itself was also partly a literary history. Like many of the other feminist books of the 1970s, such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), it was characterised by genre-crossing.

Summers was a member of Sydney Women’s Liberation and the collective for the journal Refractory Girl. In Refractory Girl, she began the survey of the ‘image of woman’ in Australian women’s writing which she would continue in Damned Whores. In line with her wider argument that ‘where women have participated in Australian culture it has had to be with due acquiescence to a game whose rules were drawn up without their consent’, Summers approached women’s writing, and writing on women, as symptomatic of a sexist culture.

Under the conditions of what she called’ ‘cultural apartheid’, women writers were confined to their own quarters and genres, critically neglected and entirely lacking in a recognised tradition. Nor were women characters taken seriously or given proper complexity, including, Summers argued, by many women writers themselves. In Damned Whores, as part of her larger quest to liberate Australian women from entrenched cultural stereotypes, Summers pushed for ‘honest’ writing about women’s lives, like Mary Gilmore’s (1865–1962) poetry or the mid-twentieth century fiction of Christina Stead (1902–1983).

Summers was on the judging panel which awarded Helen Garner the 1978 National Book Council Award for her first novel Monkey Grip (1977). In 1975, though, Summers was championing Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020), who, she wrote, ‘must possess a very special strength and conviction to continually write her splendid books about women for a world that mostly fails even to acknowledge their existence’. Although Harrower withdrew from public life in the late 1970s, she was rediscovered and republished in the twenty-first century. The 50th  anniversary of the publication of Damned Whores and God’s Police coincides with the publication of not one, but two major biographies of Harrower.

Damned Whores and God’s Police has been canonised as one of the first major feminist and women’s histories in Australia. Summers, though, never claimed it was a history, or at least not exclusively so. In the introduction to the first edition, she wrote that this ‘book is neither history nor sociology although it draws on techniques and materials from both disciplines. It also explores other areas such as literature, psychology and medicine’.

In her autobiography Ducks on the Pond (1999), Summers devotes a chapter to the book’s origins. She was still a postgraduate student when she pitched a ‘short book about mateship’ to John Hooker, chief editor of Penguin Books Australia in August 1971. Hooker saw ‘books as vehicles for social change’ and ‘wanted to produce an Australian list that defined the country and its issues in the 1970s’. Hooker also published Kevin Gilbert’s (1933–1993) book Living Black (1977) and had been deeply involved in the sensational trial involving Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which was banned in Australia, with the ban lifted in 1971 and the censorship system largely dismantled.

Summers told Hooker she wanted to ‘write something that helped Australian women understand themselves better’, and that ‘we need[ed] to understand our past…so that we could deal with and understand the present’. She was ‘strongly influenced’ at the time by Ann Curthoys’ essay ‘Historiography and Women’s Liberation’ first published in Arena magazine in 1970 (and later republished), especially ‘her argument that the governing ideologies in Australia, mateship on the one hand, and the liberal, Christian idea of the family on the other, were heavily male oriented.’

Although Summers had promised a ‘quickie’ book to be delivered by April 1972, she soon found, however, that she could not confine herself to literature. She started reading Australian history – most notably Manning Clark (1915–1991) and Russel Ward (1914–1995) – and spent a year at the Mitchell Library in Sydney poring over manuscripts and historical records. Henry Mayer, her PhD supervisor in the Department of Government at the University of Sydney, introduced her to the ‘Hegelian notion that ideas could change history, and that by extension people could consciously reinvent themselves and change the world’, a view which chimed with feminist consciousness-raising.

During the writing of Damned Whores, Summers moved into a ‘pleasant federation-style’ share house in Piper Street North, Annandale, to share with Lyndall Ryan, another PhD student involved in Women’s Liberation. Ann Curthoys and John Docker had just married and moved out. In Ducks on the Pond, Summers recalled that she had ‘leapt at the opportunity to share with Lyndall’ who, in addition to her ‘directness, her great ability to exaggerate and her passionate love of all things Australian’ was a historian who ‘understood immediately what I was trying to do with my book … and gave me a great deal of advice on research methods’. Ryan had once worked as a research assistant for Manning Clark and he sometimes still called her for a chat. If Ryan wasn’t home, Clark would talk to Summers, who ‘couldn’t believe that I was in conversation with the great historian of Australia’.

Between signing the contract and publishing Damned Whores, Summers became a public figure, and one of the most high-profile Women’s Liberationists in the country, especially after Elsie opened in March 1974. These were the years (1972 to 1975) when the Whitlam Labour government provided state funding for social welfare, including supporting parents’ benefits which made it possible for women to leave abusive marriages. In June 1975, the Federal Government finally announced they would fund women’s refuges across the country, easing Elsie’s funding problems. It was a struggle which pitched Sydney Women’s Liberation against Elizabeth Reid, the women’s advisor to Whitlam, who had excluded women’s refuges from the terms of the one-off International Women’s Year grants. We can read of the tension between Summers and Reid in Ducks on the Pond.

During this high-profile time of activism and media appearances, Summers was routinely introduced as the author of a forthcoming book about ‘women in Australia’, and ‘almost everyone’ advised her about its contents. At a critical point, Humphrey McQueen, author of the ground-breaking Australian history A New Britannia (1970) sent an ‘encouraging note’, suggesting she ‘write for someone in particular…it will help you focus on what you have to say’. McQueen also recommended she read British Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb’s autobiography My Apprenticeship (1926).

Damned Whores and God’s Police was finally published on 5 November 1975, six days before the sacking of the Whitlam Labour government. Summers’s ‘quickie’ book had blown out to ‘more than 200,000 words and 494 pages of densely packed type’. Somehow, she was able to submit a hard cover version, without the saucy cover, as her PhD. Once the book was out in the world, her life ‘changed forever’.

On two occasions since my first encounter with Damned Whores and God’s Police I have had the honour and privilege to help celebrate the historical significance and enduring cultural impact of the book. Both times Anne Summers has stressed the influence of history and historians on her work.

In 2015, to mark the 40th anniversary of Damned Whores, a three-day conference was held at the University of Technology Sydney, hosted by the online feminist group Destroy the Joint. The program was packed with activists, front line workers from women’s services, public servants, unionists and social policy researchers. There was also a ‘history panel’, titled ‘5 Piper Street North, Annandale’ in honour of the house where Damned Whores was partly written and where Summers, Curthoys and Ryan had all lived as PhD students. I interviewed the three of them about that formative time in their activist and scholarly lives.

What I still have from that conference are some photographs, and a lovely thank you letter that Anne sent to the panel. The session, Anne writes, ‘was an unqualified success’. She shared  that ‘some people [said] that they were expecting it to be “boring”, but they were enchanted by it’. Ann Curthoys’ slide show and a photograph of the house were the ‘glue’ that ‘brought it all together’, while Lyndall’s ‘memories and anecdotes … brought those days to life in ways that people really responded to’.

Fast forward another decade, and for the 50^th anniversary, I was in conversation with Anne at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May 2025. Summers reiterated the influence of Ann Curthoys, John Docker, Lyndall Ryan and Humphrey McQueen on the writing of Damned Whores:

I was astonished to learn the kind of writing they were doing. They were looking at Australia through different eyes, and they were rewriting the history of Australia through the labour eyes of the labour movement, or through the eyes of the treatment of Aborigines, or through perspectives that had just not informed the whole the received wisdom of Australia as it was written. I was encountering that way of writing history at a time when I was absolutely caught up in the revolution of Women's Liberation.

When I asked, though, whether she considered herself part of a cohort with the other oft-cited inaugurators of Australian feminist and women’s history, Miriam Dixson and Beverley Kingston, Anne shared that she was ‘actually quite annoyed when grouped’ with them, mainly because ‘I didn’t regard my book as a history book’, even though ‘history was one of the key elements of the book’. Primarily, she continued, Damned Whores ‘is a book about the Australia of today, 1975 and the past’, so to refer to it as primarily as history is to misunderstand ‘what I had actually tried to do’.

Throughout this session, audience members sent questions for Anne through Slido. Most were about the present or invited predictions about the future. Only a couple were about the past. As seen at another 50^th anniversary event – the conference marking 50 years of Elsie refuge in Sydney in March 2024 – Anne Summers continues to use history and historical commemoration to make meaningful interventions into the present and to seed a better future. Half a century on from the establishment of Elsie and the publication of Damned Whores, Summers has shifted her focus back to domestic violence, producing data-driven research that has already had a direct impact on public policies.

Damned Whores and God’s Police is a living document, not exclusively history or a product of its time. It starts conversations, draws crowds and brings people together who want to understand their own lives, and to change the world. In Ducks on the Pond, Summers recalls that while it was still a work-in-progress, ‘the book had taken on a life of its own’. It has had one ever since.