by Julia Baird
Some political journalists argue that to talk of gender means introducing an intellectually weak, lame excuse for bad behaviour: the ‘gender card’. The ghosts of a thousand thwarted ambitions roam the corridors and offices of parliament houses — those men and women who would be/should have been/almost were ministers, leaders or prime ministers (or those who were-but-then-were-robbed-of-victory-or success-or-acknowledgement). Politics is timing, luck, talent, and resilience. It is also about withstanding the attacks of your enemies — and of course the more powerful you are the more you’ll have. It is easy to dissect and dismiss the individual experiences of women MPs, but when viewed collectively it is clear that a specific way of viewing women has frequently interfered with the way they are seen and the progress of their careers. The fact remains that the position of women is more tenuous and their grasp on power more slippery by virtue of their gender and the intense scrutiny — both sympathetic and hostile — of the media.
It is true, also, that female politicians are not simply victims of vicious politics, or sexism. The fact that some women, like many male politicians, can use the media for their own political success adds to the cynicism of journalists and commentators, who no longer view them as victims of a sexist press but agents of their own profiles. That journalists both resist and expose any attempts at manipulation makes controlling the media a difficult task. But not impossible. In this book, I will look at how many women politicians — like Flo Bjelke-Petersen and Natasha Stott Despoja — have exploited the stereotypes and superficiality of press coverage for their own gain.
It is difficult to generalise about the media. It is a large, sprawling beast with thousands of heads, all talking at once. Journalists are trained to be suspicious and cynical, and dissent is part of the trade, seen in daily disagreements with colleagues, editors, publishers and subeditors within their own papers, let alone other newspapers. Each day is a mad scramble to break stories, get the facts right, edit and correct copy, and spin the plates of newspaper rounds like health, education, rural affairs; the work can be systematic, deliberate, and chaotic all at the same time. This is why it is important not to buckle to conspiracy theories. Timing and personality, along with the daily news flow and the views of key commentators, are often more influential in determining news coverage than any predetermined agenda.
Nor are newspapers the simple hierarchical, entirely male structures many people assume them to be. Editors can of course place their stamp on stories, but the rapid pace of news means often the people who have the most influence on the nature and placement of news coverage are the individual reporters and key figures including the chief of staff, news editor, night editor and chief subeditor. There are multiple, competing voices within media organisations, and often just one edition of a newspaper contains several different approaches to reporting on prominent women. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, for example, despite a frequently dismissive attitude to the women’s movement from reporters, editorials were often devoted to the lack of women in parliament, and they usually supported the right of women to be there on equal terms with men.
However, a large, differentiated organism like a newspaper still suffers from wheel alignment problems in the way major events are reported: a veering towards a blokey sensibility; to the way it has always been done; to what political scientists call predetermined ‘frames’ — or today, tropes — which decide the way stories are written and presented. Often a failure on behalf of a reporter or chief of staff to produce correctly framed stories means those pieces will not get a run. The majority of newspaper editors and bureau chiefs are still men, reflected in the language which differentiates between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ stories, and refers to the running of a story as ‘getting it up’. Recently I heard one editor tell another he didn’t want the ‘soft cock’ stories to be dumped on his section at the end of the day — he only wanted ‘hard news’.
While researching this book, I went from analysing the press gallery from afar to sitting in it myself. I started as a reporter and editor at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1998, when I was a cadet. I spent only six months in the state and federal press galleries, but as a reporter and opinion editor I have interviewed and worked with dozens of politicians. I also worked briefly on the closest thing the Herald has to a gossip column, then titled ‘Stay in Touch’, and witnessed the ready reversion to diminishing clichés when poking fun at female MPs: reference was made to Jackie Kelly’s cleavage at a ball, and Amanda Vanstone’s physique at a sausage and beer party she hosted for the press gallery. Broadsheets have a long tradition of trying to disguise sexism as satire. But personal comments are not always necessarily sexist. As a trainee asked to write a colour story about an unremarkable first day of federal parliament, it was oddly difficult to refrain from referring to the fact that, in a mob of dark suits, Cheryl Kernot and Bronwyn Bishop wore matching white skirts and jackets. Opposite sides of parliment, diametrically opposed views, but exactly the same clothes. Trivial, yes. But these kinds of human details are what gives life to a story, what reporters crave, and why they flock to unusual politicians who dress or speak differently. (In the end I didn’t mention it, although journalists from other newspapers did.) We should be able to describe people’s appearance — journalists are often told they are the eyes of their readers — but it should not be done gratuitously, repetitively or selectively. It is appropriate in personal profiles, and men should be treated the same way.
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Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Margo Kingston wrote that, three years before she finally stood for leader, Natasha Stott Despoja asked for her advice, as she had asked many journalists, about whether she should run, saying the media wanted her to. Kingston warned her: ‘You’re the touch of excitement and attractive product the media drools over. But if you rely on the media to bring you up, it will just as quickly drag you down. The shift from media darling to media tart can come in an instant. The media is a fickle, dangerous support base.’ These words proved to be prescient. In the 1990s, many female politicians were accused of being media tarts, as journalists wooed them then ridiculed them. By the journalists’ rationale, news stories that trivialised or stereotyped women were not the sign of a superficial or image-obsessed press, but the outcome of vain, ambitious women who craved the spotlight and pretended to be better than the men.
The story of female MPs and the media is a story of shouting matches in newsrooms, of senior journalists who cross swords in print and stop talking to each other for years, of too-cosy relationships and betrayal. It involves gossip, innuendo, dirty tricks, voyeurism, nervous breakdowns, tears, and odd alliances. It is also a tale of women fighting back, using stereotypes to their advantage, verballing journalists, refusing photographers’ requests, and learning to laugh at themselves. It is a story of women who, like Pauline Hanson, have been determined that there was ‘no way in the bloody wide world’ they were going to allow the media to make them lose their seats or their sanity.
PRELUDE
‘A rare kind of woman politician’: Margaret Thatcher’s visit to Australia in 1976
Mrs Thatcher made it plain she would prefer less publicity about her hair and more about the content and impact of her speeches. But all the same, her new hair-do is an enormous success, as Australians will soon see. Margaret Thatcher, who is 50, is slim, has a peaches and cream complexion that has been left unlined by the English climate, and Australians who don’t hate her politics are going to ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ over her, without any doubt.1
She had been described as a steely blonde bombshell, the Marilyn Monroe of British politics, the Iron Lady, the Ice Maiden, and a politicised Edna Everage. And now she was coming to Australia. On 13 September 1976, Margaret Thatcher, the first female leader of the British Conservative Party, stepped off a plane in Sydney, prepared for what a local reporter described as a great test: facing the Australian media. Until then, journalists had read only second-hand accounts of the former barrister and chemist who,
two months into International Women’s Year, had defied all the pundits and become the leader of the Tories. Words of praise and astonishment tumbled over each other in articles that questioned how she could be both attractive and strong, and how she could remain immaculately groomed while working hard. She was described as an exceptional kind of woman who men desired and women admired. A woman who was unlike other women, who scared her male colleagues and outshone them. On the tabula rasa that was the powerful woman in the popular imagination, Thatcher came to embody everything a woman could be — and everything most women were not.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent, T.S. Monks, wrote that Thatcher’s visit would provide Australians with ‘a chance to study a rare kind of woman politician’. While there were dozens of conservative women who looked like her, few had her ambition, he wrote, or her background of academic success and rapid political promotion. What was most astonishing, however, was how good she looked: ‘Only tough women can have done all this, and the few in the world who have reached political pinnacles have tended to look tough. But Mrs. Thatcher does not. Nor do her fine-boned features ever look ruffled or agitated.’ Despite the long political hours, Thatcher reportedly bloomed in parliament due to an ability to get by on four hours sleep a night, and came through these long ordeals ‘with not one of her blonde hairs out of place’.2 (Which is, after all, the aim.)
Glowing descriptions of her looks were ubiquitous in the coverage of the woman who had once modelled tweed suits for London’s Daily Telegraph, although when mentioning this, most reporters hastened to add that she was also capable and intelligent. Many journalists, male and female, exclaimed over her beauty, detailing the perfection of her skin, legs and dresses. Jilly Cooper, writing in London for the National Times, said she had not been prepared for her prettiness: ‘Old-fashioned parasol-cherished looks, an apple-blossom complexion, pearly white arms emphasised by the black dress, long beautiful legs set off by expensive black shoes.’ Ros Dunn claimed Thatcher was ‘supremely aware of being a woman. She has only to look in a mirror for confirmation: at 49, she looks at least 10 years younger, pretty and feminine, with soft gold hair, blue eyes, cream complexion and a nice pair of ankles. But behind the soft facade is a whip-lash mind and a tongue more biting than hydrochloric acid.’3 Perhaps the London Sun, on the day she was made leader of the Tory Party, summed it up most succinctly in the headline: ‘She’s no powder puff! She’s charming — and tough.’
These articles appear risible now, knowing the immense power Thatcher went on to wield both in her own country and in global politics. On the day she arrived in Australia, Woman’s Day ran an article declaring that Thatcher was ‘tough, but still feminine’, quoting her saying, ‘Clothes are immensely important to a woman. It’s always first impressions that count . . . Luckily I don’t have too much of a problem with my figure; I can wear an off-the-peg size 14 all the time.’
The fact that journalists frequently referred to her appearance led Thatcher to protest that she was not vain and not always tidy: ‘People complain I’m too immaculate to get any work done, but look, look, there’s ink on my hands and my hair’s a terrible mess.’ She told one journalist, who had asked if it was a hindrance being so good-looking, that she was barely conscious of it, adding, ‘By the time I’ve been writing a speech at three o’clock in the morning my hair is looking dishevelled. I haven’t even got a mirror in this room.’ Despite her protestations, Thatcher continued to be described again and again as an impeccably styled, good-looking woman, and changes in her hairstyle were noted by the Australian and British press.
When Thatcher campaigned for the leadership, from late 1974 to early 1975, she employed a strategy of portraying herself as an ordinary wife and mother, to counter a public image of a cold, snobbish Tory with twin-sets, pearls, and a fondness for expensive hats and Derby porcelain. In December 1970, she had earned the title of ‘Thatcher Milk Snatcher’ when, as secretary of state for education, she stopped free milk for eight- to 12-year-olds, and by 1971 the Sun had declared her to be ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’. In order to prove she did not lack ‘the common touch’, Thatcher took the advice of former television producer Gordon Reece and deliberately cultivated the image of a dedicated housewife: allowing herself to be photographed dusting, cooking, washing up, baking cakes, putting out empty milk bottles, peeling potatoes, and sweeping paths wearing a lacy cap. She told the Daily Mirror in February 1975: ‘What people don’t realise about me is that I am a very ordinary person who leads a very normal life. I enjoy it — seeing that the family has a good breakfast. And shopping keeps me in touch.’ In Australia, photographs of Thatcher were labelled simply ‘suburban housewife’.
After Thatcher was elected leader of the Tories, headlines in articles written by London correspondents for the Australian media proclaimed: ‘The Leader is a Wife too!’ Photographs of ‘the smile of victory’ were compared to ‘the smile of content’ as she stood at the kitchen sink washing the dishes. Readers were assured that ‘the twins, Mark and Carol . . . had their good-night kiss and tuck in without fail over the years’. She was reported to put ‘all her academic brilliance into cooking’, and to be a kind and sensitive hostess who, even in the midst of intense discussions with colleagues at her home, was ‘forever checking on people’s glasses and replenishing their cups with fresh tea and coffee’. Just as all leaders do.
The news of Thatcher’s election as leader of her party came in the middle of the decade in which second-wave feminism, encapsulated in books such as The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique, and Damned Whores and God’s Police, had clambered onto the front pages of newspapers, shaken a fist in the face of the establishment, and was slowly gaining a voice in mainstream politics. However, her triumph was represented in the press not as a breakthrough for women’s liberation but, paradoxically, as an affirmation of the ideal of the ‘wife and mother’ role for women. Following Thatcher’s leadership coup, Dr Claire Ibister of St Leonards wrote a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, expressing relief: ‘Whatever our political attachments, we family women must say thank you Mrs Thatcher, and perhaps there is yet hope that our contribution to society as mothers and home-makers will be recognised in International Women’s Year.’4 Thatcher told journalists she owed nothing to women’s liberation and did little to promote other women in the Tory Party, or the interests of women generally.
Yet her achievement and carefully cultivated image created a legacy that set the standard for female politicians from all parties in Australia. Newspaper editorials constantly asked where our own Thatcher was, while reporters did their best to find a local replica. There were few to choose from, however. Until the 1980 election, there had been only four women in the House of Representatives, only one of whom lasted more than a term, and 12 in the Senate. Between 1950 and 1965 there were no women in the House of Representatives. In 1976, the time of Thatcher’s visit, there were again no women in the House of Representatives and only six in the Senate: Margaret Guilfoyle, Ruth Coleman, Kathy Sullivan, Jean Melzer, Shirley Walters and Susan Ryan. The Fraser government had only one woman in cabinet, Margaret Guilfoyle, who had been minister for social security since 1975, and there were no women in the shadow cabinet. There had been no women ministers in Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam’s cabinet. While Fraser had said he wanted more women in parliament to ‘brighten up the place a bit’, the Daily Telegraph wrote that he ‘might find himself squirming a little if Mrs Thatcher asks him a few pointed questions on female representation in parliament’.
Thatcher had already inspired a dozen different nicknames by the time she landed on Australian shores for the first time as party leader. She was called the Iron Lady by the Russian press in January 1976, following her first foreign policy speech as leader of the opposition in which she criticised Russian expansionism and armaments. Even before this, she had been referred to as a ruthlessly ambitious ‘iron butterfly’ in the British media. The ‘iron lady’ l
abel appeared in many guises, including the Iron Maiden, the Ice Lady and the Cold War Warrior. She had also been described by the Daily Telegraph’s London correspondent as a ‘peaches-and-cream sedate Marilyn Monroe of British politics’, a ‘sort of politicised Edna Everage of England’, a Boadicea, the ‘blonde, steel bombshell of British politics’, and a ‘stern, starched, impeccably tailored but coldly-grey angel of political doom’. The female allegories — as yet unmined for female political leaders — were seemingly endless as the press probed what was considered a peculiar hybrid of power and femininity. She was the Iron Lady with a feminine side, the most powerful woman in Britain who cried when things got too much, and relaxed by doing the ironing.
The articles on Thatcher are extraordinary because reporters are so continually astonished at what women are capable of: thinking, working, and looking good! Imagine if, instead of a woman called Margaret Thatcher entering a world of men, the press were reporting on a man called Merv Hatcher entering a world ruled by women, giving hope to all Aussie blokes with an eye to power.
If we were to follow closely the formulae and descriptions used for Thatcher in what I read in several hundred articles about her, this is how stories of Merv would read. The (usually female) journalists would cluster around him, gasping at the thickness of his hair and the tautness of his physique, noting that he also had opinions on Russia and economic policy. After describing his physical attributes in detail, the copy would continue:
And to think: he manages to lead the party and still fetch the paper in the morning, bright as a button after only four hours sleep. Proving his devotion to his family, he also manages to mow the lawn on the weekend.