by Julia Baird
In the 1980s, pregnant politicians insisted they could combine children and career effortlessly, wary of preselectors and constituents ready to level accusations of child neglect at them. Over the decade, a significant number of women who had young children — and had worked — were elected to parliament, unlike those elected in the 1960s and 1970s, who were either single or had grown-up children, and had promoted the joys of a traditional family life. The number of women who were appointed ministers also tripled in the 1980s, particularly due to the Hawke and Keating Labor governments between 1983 and 1996.5
In the 1990s, people who criticised mothers for working were scoffed at. Over this time, a seismic shift in the way working women were regarded had occurred, largely because so many women had moved into the workforce. When NSW Liberal candidate Wendy Jones was critical of her Labor opponent, Gabrielle Harrison, in 1994 for campaigning when she had a young child, she was howled down. Harrison’s politician husband had just died of cancer and she had decided, at the age of 30, to run for his seat of Parramatta. Jones’s comments on radio were laced with judgement: ‘I have some concerns as a mother that perhaps now is not the best time for Gabrielle to be standing . . . from a mother’s point of view I’d be focused on my child, or children in my case.’ Harrison received a large amount of sympathy: she was supported by the vast bulk of talkback callers, and after she appeared on Channel Nine’s ‘Midday Show’, elderly women shouted out, ‘Good on you.’ There was a 10 per cent swing to Labor in the by-election; she said it was a ‘victory for working mothers everywhere’. At the time, Harrison dismissed Jones’s remarks as ‘contemptible’, but in 2001 she told a journalist: ‘[it] still stings after all these years. Nobody asks a male politician who’s minding their child, but I was being judged as a mother.’6
A year before Marshall put her hand up for parliament, Anna Burke, the Labor member for the Victorian federal seat of Chisholm, concealed the fact that she was pregnant with her second child when she stood for re-election. She eventually wrote to the Age to announce her pregnancy, saying she ‘chose not to tell anyone our great news so I could get on with the job of holding the seat without public distraction. Nor had I informed the ALP of the future birth of our second child, because I did not want to be excluded from consideration for advancement.’
Burke had given birth to her first child during her first term and taken six weeks off before returning to work. She insisted that being a mother had not stopped her from performing her duties as a politician, and that ‘no male in parliament has ever been questioned about his ability to be a father and an MP at the same time.’7 Burke later told me she regretted writing the letter to the Age because by then she believed she did not have an obligation to tell anyone: she was in her late 30s and her pregnancy was in an early stage. She said she was prompted to do it by constant references to the pregnancy of Jackie Kelly, a federal Liberal MP from Sydney, in the press: ‘It’s no one’s business; I was in an early stage in the middle of my campaign. But every time I looked at the paper, it was pregnant Jackie. It was the annoyance of it, that somehow we are these altered beings, that I would have been a different being because I was pregnant.’
It has long been assumed that the families of male politicians make sacrifices; the families of female politicians suffer. That, after having children, the careers of male politicians coast along while those of women are under threat. Because of this, the first female MPs to have babies in office were defiant about their ability to combine motherhood and politics. Queensland Liberal MP Rosemary Kyburz told a journalist during her first pregnancy in 1982 that she and her husband shared the housework and intended to share childcare: ‘I am certainly going to make sure I’ll be back in Parliament within a month of the birth. I couldn’t stand being a fulltime mother and wife.’ She was determined to transform expectations of working mothers, and was credited with bringing ‘romance and baby-feeding routines to the Queensland Parliament’.8
When federal Labor MP Ros Kelly returned to work, air cushion in hand, a week after giving birth, she sniffed at suggestions she should be at home with her baby. It was 1983, she worked close to her home in the ACT, her mother helped with childcare, and it was, frankly, nobody’s business. As Australia’s first federal MP to give birth while in office, she was emphatic about her responsibilities as a working politician. Initially, the newspapers expressed only a mild interest, reporting that she’d had a 15-hour labour, forceps delivery and stitches, and had no time to do antenatal exercises. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that becoming a mother was not expected to disrupt her career.
After one of Kelly’s parliamentary colleagues, Liberal MP Bruce Goodluck, attacked her for neglecting her child, however, scrutiny intensified. ‘Why doesn’t she stay at home a little longer?’ he asked. ‘Her husband’s got a good job and I’m sure Parliament would be only too happy to give her maternity leave. If children are put straight into child minding centres after birth, God help us. Who wants the socialisation of babies?’ Several female journalists leapt to Kelly’s defence. Kate Legge wrote: ‘The old saying “Mother knows best” was turned on its head last night when a male parliamentarian claimed he knew better.’9 Kelly insisted it was a private family matter and ‘a personal decision, not the launch of a campaign for working mothers’. She told one reporter that being a mother made her a better politician because it made her more relaxed.10 If she protested too much, it was because she felt she had to. As another journalist argued, the ‘MP mum’ was keen to minimise any concerns about her heavy workload because she was under ‘great, if subtle pressure, to appear as if absolutely nothing has changed’. She went through her daily routine in painstaking detail for several reporters.11 She told one that she wore rouge on her cheeks over a light foundation because ‘it helps when you are tired. People are always looking for signs that you’re not coping.’12
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Unlike housework, mothering cannot be easily delegated. While in the 1980s the vacuum cleaner requests largely subsided, journalists continued to ask what became known as the ‘casserole question’: how do working mothers cope? Victorian Labor MP Kay Setches, who was elected to parliament in 1982 and went on to be a minister in the Cain and Kirner governments, found that: ‘The press always wanted to know first about the nurturing side of you, and the responsibilities that you have as a woman, and how you are handling them, and whether they are clashing with the other responsibilities you have as a public person.’13 Like others, she was torn between the desire to prove women could do it all and the need to explain how difficult it could be, and argue for policy and attitude change. It was a difficult position to be in: while ‘MP mums’ shared the guilt and exhaustion of many working women, they were constantly forced to prove their ability to combine both effortlessly.
Carmen Lawrence, dubbed ‘Lawrence of Suburbia’ when first elected to state parliament, tried to be candid about the complexity of being a working parent. She was elected as the Labor member for Subiaco in Western Australia in 1986, held a series of portfolios, and went on to become Australia’s first female premier in February 1990. Her government was the first in Australia to have five women in the cabinet at the same time. Although she was then the nation’s most powerful woman, she was happy to be photographed in the kitchen, because she said she wanted to provide a positive portrayal of motherhood without diminishing the difficulties many people experienced in parenting. She told me in 1997:
Because you also don’t want to deny that [you are] a mother . . . to deny that I had that additional responsibility would be to sell a lot of women out too . . . I like the things that women do. I like to cook. Having my son and bringing him up was one of the most potent experiences of my life, and I know that is true for many women. On the other hand, being the only one to do that — being required to do it — is onerous . . . At one level you want to say, ‘Look, I’m a politician making decisions that affect you and the sort of person I am doesn’t matter.’ But on the other, there’s this sense
of being a woman in a political system. A novelty. And [it is] important to represent the breadth and complexities of women’s lives. Because they can’t just walk out the front door in most cases, and close it behind them.
Many women were uncomfortable with the glossy image of the ‘superwoman’, glorified in the 1980s and 1990s in the way the housewife had been in the 1950s, which implied women could manage everything just by their immense organisational ability, effortlessly combining careers with having families. This was fed by photographs of women cheerfully stirring pots on the stove after 14-hour working days, and articles where women said they easily coped with the workload by sheer efficiency, or some other mechanism such as paid help, lack of sleep, or otherwise unemployed grandparents.
Journalists, however, were often more sympathetic than political parties. When June Craig’s husband fell ill in 1981, and colleagues spread rumours that she would resign to look after him, a female journalist, Leslie Anderson, wrote an opinion piece arguing that when men worked hard for the community, they were praised for good citizenship, while women were accused of neglect.14 Similarly, Prue Leggoe, a Victorian lawyer, faced a preselection contest for a state seat in 1981 — when she was Prue Sibree — which she survived without controversy. Her second preselection, in 1984, was bitterly disputed on the grounds that she had separated from her husband, was in another relationship, and was facing a fight for custody of her children. While some branch members threatened to resign if she was selected, and circulated rumours about the illegitimate child she had borne at the age of 19, Leggoe said she found journalists ‘very supportive’:
All of them to a ‘t’ said, you know, ‘Anything we can do, you know we’re with you. Everyone’s saying these blokes who are trying to run against you are a pack of shits.’ . . . They didn’t want to pry too much into the private life and they sort of said, ‘Well that’s your business.’ . . . I think perhaps the press saying publicly that they thought the thing was not the right way to go, it was an unfair sort of thing to happen [which] probably swayed some people to think twice about it all.
Leggoe won the preselection and remained in parliament until 1988, when she resigned.15
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The prospect of role reversal was something that made our forefathers shudder, and argue vehemently against the vote. Tasmanian MP Sir Edward Braddon sketched the dreaded scenario in the debate over the Commonwealth Franchise Bill 1902:
Does the honourable gentleman think of the case when the woman will not take her husband along with her [to vote at polling booths], but will go alone and leave him at home to look after the baby and cook the dinner? That is what the honourable gentleman has to think of as a possibility in many of the homesteads throughout the Commonwealth.16
The spectre of the ‘househusband’ was frequently used as a derogatory term in the 1970s and 1980s. Possibly the most famous of them was Democrat senator Janine Haines’s husband, Ian Haines, who looked after their two daughters in Adelaide when parliament was sitting. Janine Haines’s domestic arrangements were often described as ideal for women who wanted to succeed in politics, but she was irritated by the fact that she was asked throughout her career how her family would cope when she went to Canberra. She told journalists her husband was supportive and they had ‘always split the task of looking after home, hearth and children, with him taking the larger share for the most part’. She admitted that, yes, she felt awful when her girls cried as the Commonwealth car came to pick her up and take her away for the week, but said she refused to let the guilt tear her up. In November 1984 she told the Bulletin, ‘[Working in Canberra] stuffs up your family life.’17
After being appointed deputy leader in 1985, she was asked again how she managed to be both a senator and a mother. She retorted, ‘Probably the same way men manage to be both senators and fathers . . . Ian is how I manage it. Every politician needs a supportive spouse . . . He is placid, easygoing with a very secure sense of his own worth. He runs the whole thing. I don’t interfere even when I am at home.’18 It was an ‘obviously touchy subject’, wrote the Canberra Times in 1986. Haines said, ‘When people say to me, “How do you feel about leaving your husband and children at home while you go to work?” I tell them that I’ll answer that question when it is asked of a man first.’19 Their arrangement was almost marvelled at. The Sydney Morning Herald reported she had ‘an extraordinary amount of help and encouragement from her husband, despite his personal lack of political ambition’.20 Haines was photographed at home with her husband several times; he was shown cooking, or bringing her cups of tea.
By 1987, some journalists were writing about the fact that other journalists were asking Haines questions about her domestic arrangements. Her frustrations became a new hook for stories, in the same way women’s refusal to pose doing their housework had been. Her complaints were printed at length:
The day I was appointed [in 1977] to fill Steele Hall’s casual vacancy, the second question asked of me was ‘how will the family cope?’ Baden Teague was elected the same month. No one asked him how his family would cope. My children were at school and my husband was at work, unlike Cathy [Teague] who had two pre-school children and no one over 18 inches to talk to. It was much harder for her. My husband once had to explain to a journalist that it actually didn’t take a giant IQ to push the buttons on an automatic washing machine. Well, we’re still married and our children are not wards of the state.21
It was at this point that the Denis Thatcher jibes began to emerge. In 1986, when Ian Haines chose to take four years unpaid leave instead of a forced transfer that would have sent him to a small town in the south-east of South Australia, he was tagged ‘Mr Mom’ in two newspaper articles for not wanting to disrupt his family life.22 Haines later said her husband ‘got pretty stroppy’ with a male journalist who asked him how he was going to cope, because ‘to argue that only by having a woman in the house do you have a well-run establishment, I think is a bit bizarre in this day and age.’23
Denis Thatcher was a name associated with complete emasculation. He was not a target for ridicule because of anything he did or said. It was simply that he was married to a woman substantially more powerful than he was. This fact alone made him a laughing stock — as though to be a real man it was necessary to dominate your wife.
Janine Haines’s partner, Ian, was frequently referred to as the model househusband. In this photo, he brings his wife, who was recovering from pneumonia, a cup of coffee. Craig Golding/Sydney Morning Herald
Like Ian Haines, Tony Vanstone, the husband of South Australian Liberal politician Amanda Vanstone, was also often called ‘Denis’, much to his annoyance. Even Ros Kelly’s second husband, David Morgan, an influential economist who went on to be CEO of Westpac, was dubbed ‘Denis’ occasionally, which, he said, ‘hit a little sharper’ than being called Mr Kelly.24 NSW Liberal minister Virginia Chadwick resented the jokes her husband Bruce was subjected to:
Perhaps some people are quite kind, and they think you haven’t heard a Denis Thatcher joke before, but it does get very wearing, and it is debilitating, and it’s just another little chipping away at the capacity of couples to actually make it work in this sort of environment . . . It’s really hard for a bloke who has been brought up in a traditional environment who’s trying to make all of those adjustments and be very modern and supportive who then amongst their own peers is belittled, even though they mightn’t see it as belittling.
The questions fired at Ian Haines revealed a belief that his position was unenviable and unfortunate. Did he regret anything? Did he feel he had missed opportunities? Peter Coster from the Melbourne Herald described his discomfort: ‘Ian Haines was clearly used to deflecting loaded questions: he denied being Haines’ husband brought “demands”, that life was difficult with two teenage daughters, or that they were resentful.’ But then Coster went on to ask: ‘Would he agree that some husbands might feel resentful of what is a role reversal more public than perhaps any other in Australia?’25 In a si
milar vein, Ivo Crosio, the husband of NSW Labor politician Janice Crosio (who became the first female cabinet minister in NSW, in 1984), had to reassure the Sun-Herald that he’d ‘never really had any sort of problem about being married to a “famous” woman — people expect you to, but honestly, it’s never really crossed my mind.’26 It seems many journalists expected them to.
It is not unusual for female politicians to say they wish they had a ‘wife’ to support their political careers; however, few women MPs have actually had househusbands who looked after young children full-time. (They were more likely to be the partners of Green, Democrat or Labor women.) In fact, many marriages dissolved under the pressure of being a political spouse. Meg Lees told the Sydney Morning Herald that when she left her 25-year marriage her husband was seeing someone else, but that she was ‘quite happy to put on the record that one of the reasons he gave for going was that I left him with too much responsibility for the kids and too much responsibility for the housework’.27
There were others. Victorian Labor politician Valerie Callister partly blames the break-up of her marriage on the media attention and discomfort of her husband with an at-home, non-traditional role. He was reported frequently in the media as a househusband, she said, and ‘in the long haul it didn’t rest easily with him, and I think it’s a tall order to ask anyone to turn the whole sociology of their upbringing on its head . . . It didn’t really last because I think that males are still defined in society largely by what they do . . . and he wasn’t used to any sort of media attention; it used to make him nervous. He just wanted to be an anonymous person, which is understandable, and it just did not work out.’ Victorian senator Jean Melzer also says her marriage broke up because her husband disliked being an ancillary to a senator.28