Editorial

We have been compiling this edition against a somewhat disturbing context in which one cannot but wonder where issues of gender are heading in a nation-Australia-that seems to be moving further and further forward to a past of rigidly gendered social practices. With a Prime Minister who has embraced Catherine Hakim's threefold "preference theory" of women's choices in relation to work and children, and a government that has recently put the issue of abortion back on the agenda and a lobby group, the National Fathering Forum, launched by the former Opposition Leader with the aim of redressing the problems of the "new disadvantaged group-men", we find ourselves facing the underlying assumption that the world of paid work is the province of men and that of the domestic the proper province of women.