I manage to steel myself with the help of Anais Nin and A Woman Speaks: At this time, we are at a very crucial moment. We are seeing the development of woman, which is lagging behind the development of man, and therefore he will have to forgive us if the emphasis is on her – woman … there is some work to be done by women which is going to be temporarily very intense, very obsessional, and very one track. Because we have some time to make up for.

We sure do. That’s why, ten years ago, I chose to work in women’s magazines instead of newspapers, much to the horror of my editor who thought was throwing away a great career in journalism. I knew then, however, that the much-maligned world of women’s magazines was the only place I could write what I wanted, no, needed to write. Back then, sport, politics and news were a men’s space, and the women’s page was called ‘Flair’.

Now, sitting in a gallery cafe, I stare across the table at my mother, into glazed eyes focused on some point that doesn’t exist or that I can’t see, and realise I have nothing to say to her. Not some trivial notion. Not one important contribution. Not even a statement of the obvious. Is she thinking that too? Time is as still as her mind, surprise as improbable as a belly laugh. All I can muster after ten minutes of silence is, ‘Our lives are very different, aren’t they mum?’ ‘Yes dear,’ she says, ‘they are’. And she retreats to the gaze I can’t fathom, her point of focus coming from somewhere in the back of her eyes.

I can’t look at my mother without thinking of Mira in The Women’s Room, her boredom so unendurable she preferred not to think at all, and Marilyn French’s immortal prose: ‘Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.’

Yes, women have had some time to make up for. Right now, over coffee with my mother, I’m saddened by the realisation that in making up for lost time some of us have left our mothers behind. Perhaps mine is now pondering the opposite: has her daughter gone too far? Why is it that we have set off on separate voyages in order to find ourselves? Over coffee, what I really wanted to say, mum, was ‘I want to call you Audrey, I want to be your friend. What are you doing with your life? Are you feeling old? What have you missed out on? Are you happy, no, I mean really happy? What would you do if you had your life again? Please, what can you teach me?’

If we could reach out to our mothers more, and they could reach out to us, maybe the notion of womanhood would be more continuous. Instead, like the vagaries of fashion, we redefine ourselves, casting off each season’s guise in a capricious search for identity: ‘I’m my own woman’, we seem to affirm. And, just to emphasise the point, we add ‘new’. What a bold notion. Of course, all the time I’ve known that an adjective will never take the place of a noun. Woman is surely enough …

New Woman. I sat down at my desk and asked myself what the word meant. Having edited the magazine of that name is one qualification for my preoccupation, I guess. Interesting how, since recently leaving the post, I feel more free to contemplate a less subjective meaning. ‘Call yourself a New Woman and the world says prove it’, someone once wrote to me in sympathy. Well, now I don’t have to prove it, I can at least examine it more critically.

Starting with the magazine. New Woman, as it is now known, was first published in the United States by Rupert Murdoch back in the 1980s. He wanted a magazine to rival Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown’s roaring success launched in the late 1960s. Gurley Brown’s philosophy was simple: ‘In Cosmo we won’t be reporting a crisis in Seoul. We’re a magazine to help young women get through the night.’ Naturally, the Cosmopolitan woman’s night revolved around sex and him – how to get him, how to keep him. It’s a formula now published in twenty-nine different countries, selling over 5 million copies and reaching 20 million women.

New Woman’s niche was more self-centred. You first. Him second. More feminist than Cosmo’s girl, it spread to the UK first in the mid-1980 (New Woman – ‘Separates the women from the girls’), and then Australia five years ago. And there it stopped. New Woman never achieved the global soaraway circulation success of its alma mater, despite what is in my view (having worked on both magazines) a more modern, realistic, better balanced view of women. While Cosmopolitan tells women that the way to get on in the world is to have a better body so men will like you, New Woman’s motivation is so you will like you.

The title New Woman also addressed the 1970s misunderstanding that feminists simply wanted women to be like men. We want to be women, it reasserted, but not the way we were. We want to be allowed to express strength as well as vulnerability. That there are shades of women, and that these shades can be contradictory, is one hell of a confusing notion to a market-driven world which seeks to define consumers as narrowly as a toothpick.

While the marketing brochure for New Woman is entitled ‘A report on women who are confident, capable, and in control’, my life as its editor, for example, was chaotic. All I ever had in my fridge was a packet of frozen peas (which came in handy when 1 burnt my arm spilling a jug of coffee). When I remembered to go to the dry cleaners it was usually with a suitcase full of clothes, and a bill that reminded me never to do it again. A visit to the hairdresser involved being sent home with four different treatments and a lecture on how to apply them to my dry, unloved hair. And I only put out the rubbish when the ants reminded me it was time.

Meanwhile, I maintained the facade at work that I was always confident, capable, content and in control. Living a life of contradiction, I soon realised, was not unique to me; in fact, most women I met through my editorship, while seeming perfectly confident and capable on the outside, were consumed by some ‘failure’ in other areas of their lives: they couldn’t get men to commit, they wanted more balance in their lives, they were petrified they couldn’t do the job and would be found out, they couldn’t decide when to start a family, they were too embarrassed to ask for a pay rise, they were frightened of being alone in old age …

This life of contradiction was the basis for my vision for the magazine: to be more real about women’s lives. New Woman would not simply repackage (or capitalise on) the Cosmo girl. Instead, it would be more honest; sure, you can have it all, but you can’t do it all perfectly. And so was borne the now infamous New Woman/Neon Pigeon cinema commercial, featuring a beautiful (sorry) woman in typical ‘adland’ scenarios, doing surprising things: falling asleep at dinner, pinching her knickers from out of her bottom, cutting her toenails and farting in a bath. ‘Being a woman is about being yourself’, was the punchline. Hear hear applauded many women – and men, too, who were relieved to see women acknowledging their imperfections.

As far as the magazine went, the new in New Woman meant simply ‘not stereotypical’. She was not like her mother, not like magazine or movie images, and not like men expected her to be. Funnily enough, she is not a new notion.

I reach for my trusty woman’s dictionary and find that the term ‘new woman’ (it’s not in Collins) is celebrating its centenary this year. Apparently, it first appeared in 1894 and applied to women of ‘so-called advanced views who advocated the independence of their sex and who defied patriarchal convention’. Chanel, it says, epitomised the new woman, ‘free and independent in every sense’.

But new women are still older than that. Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in 1792 in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, would certainly have qualified to wear the New Woman T-shirt with pride: ‘Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue.’ It seems new woman is an old story, as much as the market researchers today would like to think they’ve uncovered some new female breed.

Take this, for example, from New Woman’s qualitative research conducted in 1993: ‘These women exhibit very high levels of independence, many enjoying a level of autonomy their mothers never dreamed of … Thirty-something women are women who have identified for themselves that they are a “new breed”, a “new wave” of women.’ The document’s summary is headed, ‘Getting Marketing Value’. (I wonder, cynically, if new women all called themselves feminists, which I would argue they are, their market value would be worthless.)

If the critical mass of women has now reached independence (an average of fifty-two per cent of Australian women are in paid employment) why does the term ‘new woman’ still have relevance? If, as Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘The Power of earning is essential to the dignity of women’, then as we are now, in the majority, earning, shouldn’t we have sufficient dignity to drop the ‘new’ if not the ‘woman’ too? Shouldn’t independence grant us powers to be citizens first, and women second? Apparently not.

A friend asked me to accompany him to a Rugby Union final at the Sydney Football Stadium. He was himself an invitee in a corporate box. As we walked up the stairs to take our seats, I could hear the crowd, sense the excitement of an arena under the stars with one voice, one breath. I felt very alive. A spirited version of the national anthem sealed that oneness, and we took our seats and waited for the game to start. And then, above the hum of excited anticipation, came a voice from the end of our row: ‘Make sure you share her around mate. We all want a tum sitting next to her.’ I turned around and realised the corporate box was all male. As was every corporate box as far as I could see. Man holes. I felt winded. I was spinning.

How I saw myself was not how these men saw me, these men who didn’t know me, who want to ‘share me around’. I wanted to yell, ‘Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m your equal. I’m here for my entertainment, not yours.’ But I was dumbstruck. I could feel my personality shrink, as if I’d walked into the MENS by accident. I smiled to make light of the situation, but that moment of oneness had gone, and the game had lost its spirit for me. Transcending gender was impossible here. This was a MENS place. I felt my eyes glazing over and thought of my mother and Mira and so many women like them, waiting.

Emasculated. Yes, that is the word – deprived of strength and vigour.

For women like my mother, the world was one big MENS. Thanks to many advances for women in the past twenty-five years, the world for women is much less of a toilet, but it can still be a toilet, as my experience at the Rugby proved.

For me, the notion of being a new woman is about honesty of self-expression. I simply want to be able to express my masculine side as freely as my feminine, just as new men want to express their feminine nature as well as their masculine. (As Baudelaire said, in every one of us there is a man, a woman and a child.) But oh how complicated the whole damn thing becomes when we stick on labels and identify ourselves as women (or men) who are trying to achieve this. I soon learned that in wanting to break free of the constricts of my gender I must suffer the slings and arrows. The journey from ‘new woman’ to ‘feminazi’, for example, is perilously short in the minds of many people. Men in particular have difficult in accepting the term because it requires them to do some work or undermines their power. Some women have difficult with the label because they see it as a threat which seeks to devalue the choices they have made, or it seems unattractive. What woman would want to identify herself as unlovable? Meanwhile, for ‘new men’, it’s a fine line between being softer and being weak. What man would want to advertise his weakness?

New Womanism … journalist Richard Glover has called it ‘lipstick feminism’; I prefer to call it feminism with a smile. We’ve shown we can be tough. Through that toughness we damaged ourselves, but we also managed to create some lasting change for women, turning internal discontent into constructive political anger. Now we need to convince men we still love them, provided they will acknowledge us for what we are – their equals. If we can do this cheerfully instead of madly, so much the better. Then, as writers, women may be able to experience Virginia Woolf’s state of ‘perfect fullness’.

It’s one of life’s great paradoxes that in order to get to Woolf’s state of not thinking about our sex we must first think about our sex. In achieving the goal of gender-freedom, we must first acknowledge our gender. I can’t wait for the time when we will be able to cease to acknowledge both and just get on with it, the way men have just been able to get on with it for centuries. Maybe then ‘new woman’ will come to mean simply how the dictionary defines it, under the classification for ‘new’: ‘changed, especially for the better: she returned a new woman from her holiday’.