ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism, as a government policy addressed largely (but now not exclusively) to righting the situation of non-English speaking migrant populations in Australia, was first mooted with the election of a Labor government in 1972. This chapter provides a feminist reading of government policies of ‘multiculturalism’, primarily because a wide range of ethnic positions and politics have been fought out around the multicultural question in Australia. It turns the process around to provide a very brief ‘multicultural’ reading of feminism itself. Many of the criticisms of ‘multiculturalism’ apply equally to other bodies of thought, including ‘feminism’. In Australian feminism, one response to critiques has been to stress the plurality of feminist struggles, to stress autonomy in political organisation and struggle; in other words, to emphasise differences among women, and the specificity of the situation of different groups of women. In Australia, the pitfalls of hegemonic ethnocentrism are well illustrated in many feminist stances towards ‘family’, and the ‘family and migrant women’.
