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In September 2008, Melbourne University Press released in Australia a book on contemporary feminism I co-wrote with Monica Dux titled The Great Feminist Denial (Dux and Simic, 2008). In the weekend before the official release date, broadcaster and opinion writer Virginia Haussegger labelled us 'the door bitches of club feminism' in The Canberra Times , the daily newspaper of the nation's capital. The attack itself was not entirely surprising for in the book we critically examine the controversy that erupted in 2002 after The Age newspaper published Haussegger's opinion piece 'The sins of our feminist mothers' in which she blamed feminism for selling women the myth of 'having it all' (Haussegger, 2002: 11).1 The specific charge that we were 'door bitches' was harder to take as one of the professed goals of the book was to make feminist debate more accessible to a general readership. Monica came to the project from the mainstream media, to which she regularly contributes humorous commentary. For me, the book was a side-project from my day job as a historian of twentieth-century Australia. The cover features a disembodied pink corset that vaguely references the iconic cover of Germaine Greer's best-seller The Female Eunuch . The title was similarly designed to be eye-catching and sensational. Yet, as represented by Haussegger, the book comes direct from 'club feminism': 'the Byzantine world of academe and literary discourse between agreeing friends' (Haussegger, 2008: 13).
This article is not designed as an extended refutation of Haussegger's criticisms. Rather than defend my co-author and myself against charges of elitism in an academic journal (the irony of which would not be lost on Haussegger), I will instead use her representation of feminism as an exclusive club with its own gatekeepers to discuss academic feminism and the contrary effects it has given rise to; in particular, a new value I will call 'feminist competency'. Therefore, using Haussegger's condemnation as my starting point, and the survey we conducted for the book as my case study, I will elaborate an argument that Monica and I briefly entertained in The Great Feminist Denial . This is: that the reluctance some women have to embrace the label 'feminism' is not so much the function of an 'image problem' as...