Nearly ten years ago I visited the People's Republic of China for a three-week tour guided by Luxingshe, the China International Travel Service. China-watchers among my friends told me that such a trip was called a ‘milkrun’. That term, with all its associations of haste, passing glimpses, picking up and dropping off bits and pieces, also seems the only appropriate description of the month that I spent in a very different society, the United States of America, in September-October 1986.

Any feminist going to the USA would have high expectations. North American feminism contributed so much to the formation of ideas and practices in the Australian Women's Liberation Movement, and continues to contribute to debates and strategies being explored by feminists in this country. Nevertheless, a feminist whose politics began forming in the Australian opposition to the USA's war against the Vietnamese people could hardly avoid being apprehensive as well. In December 1985 these politics had taken me to the Women's Peace Camp at Cockburn Sound to join the protest against the presence there of US warships and nuclear warheads. The contradiction between commitment of that kind and going to the USA as a guest of the US government was not lost on my friends who were making jokes before I left about ‘Susan's CIA trip’.

I don't know what informal connections might exist between the CIA and the State Department. And, in spite of the horrific, and — in retrospect — comic possibilities with which I tormented myself before leaving for America, I did not personally encounter any such connections. Some North American feminists even responded with a combination of irritation and indignation to the suggestion that I might. ‘The United States Information Agency [USIA] is the cultural exchange arm of the State Department’, they informed me, ‘and nothing to do with espionage and Irangate arms deals’. For those of us on the other end of an imperialism which has both cultural and armaments dimensions, the distinction between two sections of the US administration can seem less important than their combined effects. A major cultural event in Sydney while I was away was centred upon the US navy.