by Julia Baird
Wives of male politicians can be similarly resentful of the workload and publicity, but they do not have the added burden of aspersions being cast on their femininity, nor suffer sympathy for their bad luck at being married to a successful man.
Most articles on househusbands centred not just on the abnormality of the role, but its undesirability. The actual chores the men carried out were described at length, as though it were miraculous and extraordinary that a man could choose to do menial work or look after his family to such an extent: ‘He drove them to and from school and he cooked them dinner when he brought them home. When one of the girls developed appendicitis, he held her hand and took her to the hospital.’29 The home was still assumed to be the domain of women. Any divergences were prodded curiously and held up to question.
*
Anxieties about working women are still lived out in public disputes about life decisions of female politicians: whether to run for office, stay at home, accept promotions, and how to cope with young children. Female MPs remain symbols of a cultural ambivalence about women working. The ‘feminist’ position has long been wrongly assumed to be a singular, unchanging, and relentless push to get women to work no matter what the cost. Just as each female MP grapples with her own decisions and responsibilities, so do all of her female constituents.
When it was discovered that Labor MP Michelle O’Byrne was pregnant, her Tasmanian electorate — and talkback radio — was abuzz. Would she still be an effective MP if she had a child? She won the next election, with an increased margin, and got pregnant again. O’Byrne was one of a group of federal MPs with young children in the 2000s, which included Tanya Plibersek, Kirsten Livermore, Kate Lundy, Anna Burke, Jacinta Collins and Jackie Kelly. Some women have trumpeted their pregnancy or motherhood in their campaigns. In NSW in 2001, the 13-month-old daughter of an ALP candidate, Carolyn Neilson, featured on campaign posters in the safe federal Liberal seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, grinning and saying, ‘Vote for my mum!’
The most telling part of the debate is that it was still about women. Men still worked, were assumed to work, and male politicians were not grilled about their responsibilities, even when they had babies or toddlers. Liberal MP for the federal seat of Parramatta Ross Cameron was not challenged about the fact that he had four young children under six — including twins — as a young MP. Similarly, Christopher Pyne, another young Liberal senator from South Australia, was elected when he was 25, and his wife gave birth to four children during his political career. He took a month off work when his twins were born prematurely and kept in intensive care. He took a week off when his third child was born. Fatherhood and politics are assumed not just to be an easy mix, but an effective one. Being a father is an asset, not a liability, and it is considered career-enhancing to have children and a wife. Family portraits are used with some effect in campaign material.
While today the number of women politicians who are mothers is greater, the task is no easier. By the mid-2000s most cabinet ministers were childless or had grown-up children, and there had been few examples at a federal level of women ministers with young children. Lynne Kosky, who was made Victorian education minister in 2002, told one reporter she had to abandon her son Jack when he was halfway through surgery at the hospital to carry out some duties. She said she felt compelled not to miss Question Time: ‘You’re seen to be weak if you use that [children] as an excuse not be there.’30 Stories like these are why federal sports minister Jackie Kelly, then pregnant with her second child, resigned from the front bench after the 2001 election. Kelly, who has often railed against the pretence and pressure of the ‘supermum’ image, was criticised in the press but told me she was cheered by her constituents:
I got a lot of responses from working women and women who’d been trying to juggle both. And there was a lot of sympathy like ‘Yeah, good on you. We find it hard too, and we’re only doing a nine to five job.’ It is hard, it’s very hard. We have set women up for falls in terms of you can be the housewife, the mother, and a working woman as well. It’s an awesome amount to take on because the blokes in our society are still not doing their fair share of the housework . . . It is hard and the women in my electorate at least basically said, ‘Well yeah, it was another reinforcement that she is human. It’s an awful lot to take on.’ I didn’t realise how tired I was. Just shattered.
Feminist commentator Eva Cox was disappointed, arguing Kelly’s decision signified that ‘clearly in the higher echelons of government having a baby is still regarded as a liability’. She argued Prime Minister John Howard should have overruled her and made appropriate arrangements to help her, like providing a temporary minister to fill in when she was on leave. Bettina Arndt slammed Cox as an ‘ideological troglodyte’ who had lost sight of the fact that feminism was about choice. Kelly told me that women still face the fact that ‘kids under five wake in the middle of the night and they want Mum; that’s it. You can have all your feminist ideals as much as you want but at the end of the day they want Mum and you have to learn to cope with that, and that’s challenging.’ While she gave up her ministerial position, she continued to work, however, and Howard appointed her his parliamentary secretary. Kelly, like others, pointed out how many male politicians have supportive wives, some of whom attend functions in their place: ‘I am lucky if my husband will go to the State of Origin with me [laughs].’
In one of the most ancient of tropes, some women still like to claim they are mothers to their constituents, or indeed — in Pauline Hanson’s case — to the country. Danna Vale, Liberal MP for the federal seat of Hughes, declared in 2001: ‘My four boys have grown up, but I’ve now got 88,000 people to mother.’31 Old stereotypes die hard, and the maternal imagery is powerful, but the problem for women in the noughties is still often posed in public commentary as an either/or scenario: babies or promotions, families or careers, lonely success or loving sacrifice. The truth, of course, is that most women do both.
Postscript, 2021
The fact that it is more difficult for mothers than fathers to be federal politicians has remained true. In 1983 Ros Kelly was the first member of the House of Representatives to give birth but it took sixteen years before another woman did — Anna Burke in 1999. And it was another eighteen years after that before the first cabinet minister had a baby while in office — Kelly O’Dwyer in 2017 (also noting that when she resigned in 2019, she said she needed to be around her kids more often). O’Dwyer was reportedly annoyed when the government whip, Scott Buchholz, asked her to express more breastmilk so as to not miss parliamentary duties — even though under parliamentary rules, breastfeeding mothers are able to get a proxy vote.
Annabel Crabb has called it the ‘wife drought’, saying women in demanding jobs need the same kind of domestic and personal support their male colleagues have in their partners. (As she has pointed out, the fact that the current prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, have run the country while raising small children has gone almost entirely without comment and certainly without interrogation.) Economist and Labor MP Andrew Leigh calls it ‘The Motherhood Tax’, and conducted research that found in the federal parliament of 2013–16, the average male politician had 2.09 kids, while the average female politician had 1.22. Only one in five male politicians had no kids, while the number was more than one in three for women.32
On the upside, there is now childcare in Parliament House, and plenty more women MPs are mothers. Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek now has grown-up kids. In 2016 the House joined the Senate in allowing breastfeeding in parliament. In June 2017, Greens MP Larissa Waters stood up while breastfeeding and proposed a motion about a condition affecting coal miners. The Tasmanian election was called this year when the opposition leader Rebecca White was due to give birth, but she declared the timing was of no consequence.
CHAPTER FIVE
Feminist Politicians: ‘waving the flag of feminine feminism’
Late one afternoon
in Canberra, 1975, almost 200 women marched through the streets of Australia’s capital city to the offices of the Canberra Times, holding placards they had painted with ‘Media Oppress Women’ and ‘Watch out Media’. Women in their 20s, wearing jeans and sporting jaunty afros, walked alongside grandmothers in their 60s, wearing plaid skirts and cat-eye glasses. All had come to Canberra to take part in a Women and Politics conference, which had been thoroughly derided by the press. Finally, they had decided to make their fury heard. They forced their way into the newsroom, and, standing on desks, chairs and filing cabinets, shouted angrily at the acting editor, John Farquharson, demanding space to respond to an offending editorial. Max Prisk, then Canberra Times news editor, remembers the women cutting phone lines with nail clippers and refusing to leave. The photograph published in the Sydney Morning Herald the next day, of women crowded into the newsroom, clutching folders, handbags and banners, is a powerful image of women of all ages tackling a male-dominated press.
Journalists had taken great delight in poking fun at the conference held to coincide with International Women’s Year. Editorials across the country had attacked it as an extravagant waste of taxpayers’ money, and those who attended it as badly behaved extremists. The money that had been allocated for International Women’s Year activities the year before was headlined in the Age: ‘$2 million for the Sheilas: Surprisingly It’s Not a Joke’. Coming at a time when the Whitlam Labor government was facing accusations from the opposition and a growing number of political journalists about economic incompetence and wastage, the fact that money was being allocated to a group of women wishing to discuss the women’s movement was grist to the mill.1 Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, before the conference began, said the money was being poured ‘down the great Labor drain’, and dismissed it as a talkfest for talentless women: ‘Obviously there should be more women involved at higher levels of decision making. But we can’t help feeling that those who need a conference like this to tell them how to do it wouldn’t be very good at it anyway.’2 Attacks intensified when the conference began.
The opening reception was held in the dignified surrounds of Kings Hall in Old Parliament House. According to newspaper reports, ‘not-nice’ women spray-painted ‘Lesbians are lovely’ in the ladies toilet, food was trampled into floorboards, and drinks were spilt. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that Prime Minister Whitlam, who had struggled to be heard over interjections such as ‘sexist’ and ‘Margaret still takes second place’, ‘stood silent and grim faced’ as a group of 50 Aboriginal women demonstrated about racism in the women’s movement. A group of Labor women also stood behind Whitlam holding placards, protesting his stand on East Timor. The Daily Telegraph said it was a ‘drunken display of exhibitionism which under normal circumstances would have required police intervention’. One disgruntled delegate told the Melbourne Herald that many of the women at the conference were ‘lady mafia members who would not hesitate to punch or kick . . . The language has been disgusting, drink has been frequent and behaviour in general has been very bad. The congress is a socialist forum for a lot of women yahoos who run around in men’s clothing.’ After this reception, the Canberra Times ran an editorial that argued feminists were trying to prove against nature that there were no differences between men and women. Their error was evident, the editorial argued, in the fact that, while women may have taken literally the ‘lounge suit’ dress code on their invitation to the opening, they still carried handbags. Firebrand African-American feminist Flo Kennedy responded: ‘If I wore pearls they’d think I was an oyster.’
John Farquharson talks to women from the Women in Politics conference who had invaded his Canberra Times newsroom, September 1975. Sydney Morning Herald
The women of the conference, who were by now thoroughly annoyed with the way they were being trivialised, held a meeting, chaired by journalist Liz Fell, to discuss how to respond. They decided to head to the Canberra Times and extract a promise from Farquharson that he would run a critique of the editorial. In their long day of negotiations, the women were enraged when they asked Farquharson what feminism was and he responded: ‘femininity’. When he refused to publish the statement they submitted, and asked for a rewrite, about 80 women returned to the newspaper offices and stayed there until 3.00 a.m. Their statement was eventually published, with some cuts. According to Fell, a group of women went to the printing presses at Fyshwick to sabotage the delivery of the papers. Twenty police were waiting.
An editorial in the conference newspaper, New Dawn, concluded that the coverage showed the male-dominated Australian press had felt ‘immensely threatened’ by the fact that a large group of women had met to discuss politics: ‘In the long run, whatever course we take, the ultimate aim should be a redefinition of what is news. Right now let’s do what Flo Kennedy says and “get down to kicking arse”.’ While the march on the Canberra Times was a spontaneous eruption, reacting to coverage of a specific event, it followed years of resentment and frustration with the media about how women, and feminists, were portrayed. The ‘action ideas’ the women drew up included a total embargo of sexist media; the setting up of a government newspaper, like the ABC, with 51 per cent representation of women at all levels; sit-ins at radio and television stations; forming a woman’s radio station; and law suits. One of the suggestions was to issue ‘requests that “successful” women stop dissociating themselves from feminism’.
*
In the noughties, feminism was considered by many to be passé. Younger women frequently dismissed their female elders as too ‘70s feminist’ — outdated, earnest and hard-line. Conservative commentators still liked to pore over the supposed excesses of the chaotic and theoretically diverse so-called second wave of feminist thought (there have been many more than two). What is curious is the ‘evidence’ given for the claim that the time of feminism was finished. The prime minister, John Howard — not generally renowned for his insights into feminist thought — claimed that in the noughties we were in a post-feminist phase because women under 30 thought the battle had been won. Telstra businesswoman of the year in 2003, 33-year-old Gabrielle Molnar, said she was not a feminist because, ‘I don’t think it serves or supports my cause. And when you’re managing a corporate career, you also manage the perception around that, and you don’t want to get pigeonholed.’3 A cursory study of history shows that this was nothing new, and hardly surprising. There has always been a swathe of women who have been hostile to the central tenets of the women’s movement, and resisted every incremental victory in the emancipation of women. From the vote to equal pay, from women priests to female politicians, there have been women urging men not to support change. And feminism was long a dirty word. Even second-wave feminists were equivocal about using it, preferring the term ‘liberationists’ to something associated with their foremothers, whom they saw as dry, censorious and sexless. But the use of the word by women in the public sphere has long been a battle of conscience and identity for the women involved. As Molnar’s words revealed, when women were interested in getting ahead in blokey realms such as politics or corporations, it often did not augur well to associate yourself with something vilified as — in the 1970s — hairy-legged, unaccommodating, or extremist; or, in the noughties, something associated with whingeing or demanding special treatment. Her words could have been uttered by hundreds of women MPs since the 1960s.
Since the 1970s, there has been a Herculean shift in our understanding of feminism, partly due to the activist shock troops of dissenting women. The term ‘feminist’ has been bandied about, claimed and disclaimed, owned and disowned, attacked and trumpeted as change has inched forward — and occasionally backward. Women who entered parliament were grilled relentlessly by journalists about whether they considered themselves feminist. And, generally speaking, mostly the younger, progressive women owned the term, while older, conservative women disowned it. Most qualified it, proffering their own definition. The battle over this word reflected more generally on fears about what wo
men MPs were supposed to be doing — and how a pleasing appearance could make just about anything palatable for many (usually male) journalists.
But there are other reasons why women might have been loath to identify themselves as feminists keen to fight for ‘women’s issues’. Female MPs often worried they would be stereotyped if they said they were feminists. Former actor Elisabeth Kirkby, who was a candidate for federal parliament in 1977 and 1980, and entered the NSW upper house in 1981, felt she had to ‘temper my women’s liberation enthusiasms so that the label of being a “radical” feminist would not jeopardise my future or that of my party’.4 Many female MPs were keen to avoid being thought of as separatists who wished to work apart from and against men at a time when they were working hard, and often alone, to win the respect of their male peers. As NSW Labor MLC Edna Roper told a Sydney Morning Herald journalist in 1973, ‘I am not a women’s libber — I don’t believe in dividing the sexes.’ Victorian Liberal Margaret Guilfoyle said in 1997 that she probably would not have described herself as a feminist when she was elected to the Senate in 1971, despite thinking women had the right to reach their full potential in their chosen profession, because: ‘At that time feminism was rather regarded as displacing men rather than working together.’ She also wished to emphasise she was not a spokesperson for women, as it was assumed feminists were.5 Many spokespeople for women found they were rarely asked about anything else.
Some women politicians described feminism as a sign of weakness. Janice Crosio, who was a member of the NSW lower house from 1981 until 1990, when she moved to federal parliament, insisted that she was not a feminist because she had never personally experienced discrimination.6 She said she was concerned with women’s rights, but was no ‘women’s libber’ because she had not had any problems: ‘Primarily I’m an individual, but being a woman has never gone against me.’7 She told reporters she was tough, and dismissed their questions about bias as though they underestimated who she was: ‘My height has a certain advantage. I’m 175 cm in bare feet, 182 cm in high heels, and I invariably wear high heels. The men certainly can’t patronise me or pat me on the head and say go home little girl. It’s not the point whether you’re a man or a woman but whether you can get the point across.’8 This was a feminism predicated on personal body space: as Crosio had a commanding physical presence, and no parliamentarians had pawed her, she told journalists she did not need it.