by Julia Baird
Alan Ramsey said he liked her because she was tough: ‘Bronwyn has a shell like you wouldn’t believe. Her attitude is “fuck you all”, essentially, and she really was very, very tough mentally . . . She was not liked, but she had this determination, or stronger; she was resolute, stoic . . . you could knock her over . . . [smacks his hands] and she’d be straight up again. And she’d do some of the silliest things, but she always learnt from them . . . Bronwyn was a real politician.’ Like Farr, he believes the suggestion that she could be PM was nonsense, even though she liked to encourage it:
And, of course, there was this strange bloody woman getting around looking like Marge out of ‘The Simpsons’, and it just washed over her. You couldn’t humiliate or embarrass Bronwyn; she couldn’t humiliate or embarrass herself. And I just thought, you get top marks from me . . . this is terrible, but she had three times the balls of most of the men. Now that’s a very sexist remark, but in this place, that’s what she had. Really. She knew if she was going to get anywhere she had to do it on her own bloody merits and she had to force people to take notice of her.
Early in her career, Bishop rarely acknowledged there could be a bias against women. In 1993, she would only agree to speak to Kate Legge off the record about chauvinism, ‘woman to woman’. Legge concluded: ‘She would rather die before complaining publicly of sexism. “You just get on with it,” she snaps. Square jaw. Stiff upper lip. Squibbing prohibited.’38 In 1994, she was nominated for an Ernie award, organised by women from the NSW Labor Party, for ‘unbelievable harm to the cause of increasing women’s representation in office’.
Bishop told me, in 1994, that being parodied in the media was ‘just part of politics’: ‘Now of course . . . everybody has got biases one way or another . . . but at the end of the day, if the heats gets on, either you can stand it or you can’t.’
Having long believed Australia was ‘ready’ for a female PM, Bishop did not relinquish her dreams of leadership. As she said to me a decade before she left in disgrace:
BB: I am not one to pack up my bags and go. By the way, I am here for the next encounter.
JB: What encounter?
BB: You never know what is around the corner, what issues there are. The one thing I can say about politics is you never know when it is going to turn.
JB: Well, look at Howard.
BB: Precisely.
CHAPTER TWO
Housewife Superstars
Some there are who say, ‘If we permit women to go beyond her sphere, domestic duties will be neglected.’ In plainer language, ‘If we acknowledge woman is human, we shall not get so much work out of her.’1
— Henrietta Dugdale, president of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society, 1883
Were political office to become the latest craze of fashion, there would be many dreary and neglected homes throughout the country sacrificed on the altar of political ambition.
— Editorial, the Age, 15 March 1921, following the election of Australia’s first woman MP, Edith Cowan, to the West Australian parliament
In 2003, the federal opposition spokeswoman for health, Julia Gillard, was asked without warning to come to the on-set kitchen and whip up a pasta dish at the end of an interview with Kerrie-Anne Kennerly. It was for a television show aimed at housewives and daytime viewers. In a modern twist, however, it was sprung upon her because she does not cook: the gnocchi she attempted was a flop. Her press secretary said, ‘It was all rather bizarre’, but her predecessors would have laughed to see her struggle with the flour and dough. Ever since they began to be elected to parliament, women have been asked by photographers to hop back over their garden fences and pose in contrived displays of domestic competence. It has been a long-running cliché. It is as though, at the moment women were elected to positions of prominence in the public sphere, the press firmly pushed them back into the private, to both explain their deviance and assure readers of their normality. Some women have played along, some have suggested they pose doing something else, while others have laughed and blown raspberries.
In 1981, when a daily newspaper sent a photographer early one morning to the home of former Fairfield mayor Janice Crosio, newly elected to the NSW Legislative Assembly for the ALP, to catch her washing the dishes, her firm refusal was reported several times. She told him:
No, you cannot. Get out of my house. You can come in and do an interview with me, more than welcome to it. But no, you are not going to catch me under the hair dryer; no, you are not going to catch me with curlers in my hair; no, you are not going to catch me cooking bacon and eggs for my husband for breakfast, nor are you going to catch me cooking his dinner at night . . . You want to talk to me, [you can] whether it is down the sewerage pipeline or whether it’s at the forest or whether it’s at any other program.
The 1970s was the decade when women began to fight back, taking control of the way they were portrayed and refusing to cooperate with clichéd or demeaning photographs. Labor politician Joan Child, for example, was famous for telling women never to allow themselves to be snapped in the kitchen. In 1974, she was the first woman from the Labor Party to be elected to the House of Representatives — and the fourth from any party.2 As she celebrated her victory with friends, a Fairfax photographer came to her house and asked if she would pose doing the dishes or hanging out the washing. She resisted, and was photographed instead with a champagne glass in her hand, standing next to the washing line, over which was draped a sheet with ‘Great Going Gough’ written on it.3 The photographer was drawing on a decades-old tradition, but with five children and a lifetime of both paid and unpaid housework behind her, and a parliamentary career ahead of her, Child understandably believed it was inappropriate. When her husband died of a heart attack at age 42, she had been left to bring up the children on her own. She worked in a factory and cleaned other people’s homes. When she ran for federal parliament for the first time in 1972, she was still scrubbing other people’s floors to finance her campaign. Despite her efforts, the headline in the Australian on the day after her victory assured readers that even though she had been elected to parliament, she ‘always got home to cook the tea’.
Refusals to be photographed doing housework became the symbol of female politicians’ defiance of a sexist press and discriminatory political system, and a popular hook for stories in the 1970s. By the 1980s, these requests were regarded by journalists themselves as anachronistic and discriminatory, even though some women still agreed to them.
Domestic work has always played a central role in debates about female citizenship, and the participation of women in politics. One of the intellectual hallmarks of first-wave feminism was an argument that women deserved the vote, and a voice in parliament, because their work as wives, mothers and houseworkers gave them a vital perspective that men lacked. In the early 1900s suffragist Rose Scott extended the metaphor to the nation state, arguing the vote would enable women to ‘have a voice in the national housekeeping’. Marilyn Lake has written about a long tradition of feminists who have appropriated a nationalist discourse — also propelled by racism and imperialism — on the importance of motherhood to promote the rights and interests of (mostly white) women. This brand of feminism was attacked by second-wave feminists, who argued that by elevating the domestic work of women, the private rather than public sphere was assumed to be their natural abode.4
In a rare moment, done only for a women’s magazine, Joan Child was photographed for the Australian Women’s Weekly in a flowered apron, stirring a pot on her stove, 5 June 1974. Australian Women’s Weekly
The domestic imagery was also extended to the parliament itself, where the first women members were portrayed as housewives coming in to sweep up crumbs of corruption, bad language and rowdy behaviour; as moral guardians; or, quite literally, to decorate the place. Suffragists hastened to assure opponents their political work would not be carried out in place of their domestic labour; instead, it would be enriched by it.
By the 1960s, growing numbe
rs of women were starting to assert that housework was, in fact, drudgery. The second-wave feminists seriously interrogated domestic work, arguing it was key to their oppression. As one wrote, ‘We women have been brainwashed more than even we can imagine. Probably too many years of seeing media-women coming over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars. Men have no such conditioning. They recognise the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning. Which is that it stinks.’5 The restlessness and boredom of full-time housewives — many of whom in Australia were bombed out on Valium — was what Betty Friedan had famously called ‘the problem that has no name’, or ‘[a] strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning . . . That voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”’6 Feminists wrote personal accounts of the tyranny of labour in the home as well as histories of the housewife. Many of these histories were informed by Marxist critiques of the sexual division of labour in an industrial capitalist society, where the function of women was to provide male workers with physical, emotional and sexual support for their work outside the home. The ideology of domesticity was argued to be not an immutable truth, then, but a cultural creation.7
Another reason domestic work was hotly debated in the 1960s and 1970s was that large numbers of women were flocking to the workforce. By 1975, almost a third of women with children under 12 years were in the workforce.8 The proportion of married women who were in the labour force rose from 13 per cent in 1954 to 29 per cent in 1966. By 1979, it was 41 per cent.9 By the end of the 1970s, only 964,000 of Australia’s 3.8 million families conformed to the traditional image of a working husband, a dependent wife and dependent children. The traditional ‘nuclear family’ was no longer the family unit of most Australians.
The Australian press often portrayed women who joined political parties as wide-eyed innocents awakening from a long sleep or drug-induced stupor: ‘Thousands of Australian housewives have discovered an alternative to suburban isolation and boredom by taking an interest in the world around them.’10 Headlines such as ‘Housewife takes to politics!’ abounded, and housewives were stereotyped as naive, bored, and ill-informed. Journalists often exclaimed upon meeting intelligent or articulate women that you could have mistaken them for a ‘quiet housewife next door’.11 Peter Blazey, in an article headed ‘Battler Joan Child still takes it all in her stride: Grandmother MP is as popular as ever’, wrote that ‘it is easy to misread Joan Child by thinking her naive and housewifely’.12
Articles on women in politics in the 1970s often followed a formula of the ‘battle’ between contesting ideologies about women: should they work or stay at home? This was usually played out with women from different political parties, although sometimes men who believed women should be at home emerged to provide a foil for feminists. In June 1975 David Taylor, a Waverley Council alderman, told the Daily Telegraph that Australian women should be ‘back in the kitchen where they belong’, and argued that the money allocated for International Women’s Year should be channelled into relief for unemployed men. The headline ‘Angry alderman hits back at home role for women’ was accompanied by a photograph of ‘Bronte housewife, mother of five and fellow alderman’ Ann Symonds ironing a shirt. Symonds, who was later elected to the NSW upper house, retorted: ‘A woman’s place is everywhere — not only in the kitchen, but in decision-making areas which affect the life of everyone. Unlike Mr Taylor, who is single and lives with his mother, I am married and look after my husband and five children . . . I don’t think my baby or any other of our children are neglected.’13 Symonds later saw that article as an ‘awful experience’ of being manipulated by the media:
I was young and silly, of course, and didn’t say ‘no’, which I would now, but they are an intimidating force, the press . . . ‘Stand here, do that, do this. Have you got a washing basket full of nappies? Can you just lean on the ironing board here?’ And they had this great huge photograph of me, leaning on the ironing board with my nappies, just having been elected as deputy mayor.
The truth was, Symonds’s husband did all the ironing in their household.
The kitchen photograph was, of course, an old trick. In 1943, the election of the first woman to the Senate was followed by an article in Pix magazine that featured a neatly aproned Dorothy Tangney taking a roast out of an oven. The caption read: ‘The Senator is perfectly at Home in the kitchen, whether cooking the family’s dinner or doing [the] large wash-up which follows.’14 In 1955, Mabel Miller, who was both a barrister and the deputy lord mayor of Hobart, was the first woman to be elected to the Tasmanian lower house. The day after her election, the front page of the Mercury pictured the Liberal MP mixing a salad and assuring readers that she had carried out her chores ‘like any other housewife’ the day before. ‘Naturally it’s a great thrill to be a member of parliament,’ she said, as she bustled around in her Sandy Bay home preparing the family meal, ‘but I’ve still got to do this.’15 When Mabel Furley was preselected as the first female Liberal Senate candidate in NSW in 1961, the Mirror declared that she had conceded — while mixing a soufflé in her ‘modest Mosman flat’ — that she would have to give up sewing if elected.16
From Federation to 1972, only 42 women were elected to state or federal parliament. In 1960, there were 12 women in the country’s parliaments, and in 1972, when a record number of women ran for parliament, the number was 16 women out of 728 seats, forming 2.2 per cent of the total. Joan Child won the seat of Henty in 1974 but lost it in 1975, making the House of Representatives once again an all-male house, which it was to remain until 1980. By 1981, when Flo Bjelke-Petersen entered parliament, there were three women in the House of Representatives and nine in the Senate. Bjelke-Petersen brought the total to ten. The early 1980s saw an increase in representation across the country, not just in the federal parliament. By December 1982, there were 58 women MPs in Australia.
In the 1970s, many women became increasingly defiant. These women, many of whom had been attempting to persuade their own political parties not to restrict them to ‘political housework’, such as door-knocking, fundraising, and cleaning up at functions, were mostly from the ALP. In 1979, Jeanette McHugh, who had been a full-time housewife before entering politics, and told journalists she was proud to be a ‘mother of three’, refused to be snapped by the Sydney Morning Herald in her kitchen, saying, ‘I’m a housewife, but not a housewife superstar.’17 She was photographed sitting at a desk instead, talking on the phone. In 1980 the Sun-Herald reported that Labor MP McHugh was tired of newspaper stories about women which were headlined ‘She Always Got Home to Make the Tea’. She said, ‘Male politicians are never asked questions about their kids, or whether they mow the lawn. The fact is that politics is just as draining on families whether you’re male or female.’18
Some women, like the influential Margaret Guilfoyle, refused to participate in contrived housework shots on the grounds of privacy, as well as the belief that it diminished women and set them apart from their male colleagues: ‘I don’t think that’s got anything to do with your private life at all . . . If you don’t photograph the local judge doing something like that, I don’t see why you should photograph anyone else.’19 The fact that she had a housekeeper was her own business.
Other politicians refused these requests because they saw it not just as sexist, but contrived. When Democrat leader Janine Haines was asked if she deliberately projected her femaleness in an election campaign, she was emphatic that she would not do something she would not normally do, as she believed Margaret Thatcher did: ‘Everybody knows that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is not your average mum, that she has people to do these things for her. I don’t.’ However, she was happy to be photographed doing chores that were part of her weekly routine, like shopping with her husband.20
Feminist politician Susan Ryan, who was elected in 1975, also refused all requests to pose doing housework, on similar grounds to Haines:
I was
always deliberately against what Margaret Thatcher did so dishonestly, which was to run around the supermarket with a trolley and get pictured in the kitchen, as if a woman working as hard as that has got time to do all that domestic stuff . . . It is very discouraging to women who can’t afford to pay to have their housework done or who feel somehow it’s a failure to do it and who then feel ‘Oh my God I’m trying to hold down my job and do the shopping and the cooking and the housework and I’m a wreck’, and yet there’s Margaret Thatcher sailing around doing it all.21
She says that on the one occasion when she agreed to be photographed with her family — because her son wanted to promote his rock band — the photographer said, ‘Would you just get out the vacuum cleaner and do a bit of vacuuming for me, Senator Ryan?’ And the children just laughed their heads off and said, ‘We’ve never seen Mum with a vacuum. She wouldn’t even know where it was.’
At the same time, women MPs were actively countering bias. In Australia in the late 1970s, parties were still reluctant to endorse female candidates because of the belief that they lost votes simply because they were women. In 1977, Malcolm Mackerras compiled evidence proving this was untrue, arguing it was a mere prejudice on the part of party preselectors ‘who use it as a justification for their own refusal to select women for winnable or safe seats’.22 Between 1960 and 1969, women accounted for less than 5 per cent of total candidates. This jumped to almost 10 per cent between 1970 and 1979, and more than 18 per cent between 1980 and 1989.23
How women wished to be portrayed was influenced by more than their personal views of the role of women. Women who were standing for a lower house seat were under more pressure to draw votes from local constituents than candidates for the upper house. Another concern was whether their electorate was marginal or safe, conservative or more mixed, as well as whether their parties were campaigning on progressive, proto-feminist policies or a more conservative, ‘family first’ platform. The problem facing all women, though, was a broad cultural anxiety about the impact on families of women’s movement into the workforce. In 1977, the National Times, claiming the housewife was still the ‘dominant image’ of women in Australia in the 1970s, cited a poll which had found 46 per cent of respondents believed women could not both run a home and work, and 60 per cent thought children suffered when their mothers worked.24 The professional work of male politicians was not seen to be threatened or destabilised by private responsibilities: it was only women who were seen to have two worlds, or roles, in constant conflict.