Sometimes the thing that is stifling our progress sits right under our nose, in full view. We can sense it but don't see it for what it really is. We don't connect the dots.
Anne Summers made me think about this during her speech this week marking 40 years since the publication of her landmark feminist text, Damned Whores and God's Police. She noted that when women's activists set up Australia's first women's refuge, Elsie, they didn't talk about violence against women, or domestic violence, or sexual harassment. They didn't use that terminology because it hadn't been coined. Instead, their efforts to support women fleeing violent marriages were intuitive, grassroots responses, to a systemic form of abuse against women – that hadn't yet been named.